William Eggleston

In his beginnings, William Eggleston was initially inspired by the work of Walker Ewans and Henri Cartier Bresson before he felt that black-and-white photography did not reflect life as he perceived it. He then decided to experiment with colour, a resource hitherto excluded from art photography and whose use was mainly limited to advertising and magazine illustration.

From 1965 onwards Eggleston immersed himself in a universe, at once strange and familiar, from which he explored the everyday life of the small towns of the southern United States, where he had been born and brought up. He then photographed everything that met his eye: grocery shops and bars, office desks, everyday objects, supermarkets, service stations, road signs, family, friends, etc., images that seem to seek the aesthetic potential of the everyday and whose true motive seems to be none other than life itself, but which at the same time offer us a unique and absorbing testimony to the profound social transformations (the multiplication of the automobile, the social function of shopping centres, etc.) resulting from the acceleration of the consumer economy.

Chronologically arranged, this wide-ranging anthology covers his early black-and-white work and his later career in colour.