William Eggleston (b. 27 July 1939, Memphis, Tennessee) is the American photographer who did more than anyone else to establish colour as a legitimate medium for serious art photography. When the Museum of Modern Art gave him a solo exhibition in 1976 — the first solo colour photography show in its history — critics were largely hostile. John Szarkowski, the curator who championed him, was accused of losing his mind. Within a decade, the photographs from that show and the accompanying book, William Eggleston's Guide, had changed the terms of the conversation entirely. What had seemed trivial — the ordinary streets, cars, supermarkets, and people of the American South — turned out to be a precise, radical, and deeply personal vision of the world.
He grew up in Sumner, Mississippi, attended the Webb School boarding school, and studied briefly at Vanderbilt University, Delta State College, and the University of Mississippi without completing a degree. His early influences were Robert Frank's The Americans and Henri Cartier-Bresson's The Decisive Moment — the defining books of mid-century documentary photography. He began working in black and white in that tradition before shifting to colour in the mid-1960s, at a time when virtually no serious photographer was doing so. Cartier-Bresson himself challenged him on it: "Don't you think it's ridiculous?" Eggleston continued regardless.
He taught at Harvard in 1973–1974, where he discovered dye-transfer printing, the process that would define his best-known work. He lives and works in Memphis, though he also spends significant time in Paris. His work is held in the collections of MoMA, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Guggenheim, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum, SFMOMA, and the Centre Pompidou.
Awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship (1974), two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, the Hasselblad Award (1998), and the ICP Getty Images Lifetime Achievement Award (2004).
"I only take one frame of each picture and then it is over so quickly."
Camera Gear Used by William Eggleston
Eggleston is a rangefinder photographer, and his working system throughout his career has been built around compact, inconspicuous 35mm cameras — first Canon, then Leica. His approach to the equipment is consistent with his approach to photography itself: direct, unsystematic, and guided entirely by what the work requires.
Camera Bodies
35mm Canon rangefinder — his first camera. In an Interview Magazine conversation, Eggleston confirmed that his first camera was a Canon rangefinder, purchased at Dury's on Church Street in 1957 when he arrived at Vanderbilt University. The Canon rangefinders of the 1950s — compact, well-built, and mechanically similar to the contemporary Leicas — were widely used by photographers who could not yet afford or access the Leica system. He does not specify a model.
Leica rangefinder cameras — his long-term primary system. He switched to Leica after the Canon and has used the system throughout his career. In interviews he has described carrying a Leica almost constantly — "in my bag" if not on his person or in the car's glove compartment. In a Memphis Magazine interview, he arrived with two Leicas: an older model and a newer one that Leica had customised for him. He is known to have assembled a collection of approximately 300 cameras, the majority of them Leicas, including classic chrome-body models and rare custom-painted examples. He has described the collection as having grown into "something of an obsession." No specific Leica body models are confirmed in primary sources as his working cameras.
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| William Eggleston's Leica collection |
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Leica M5
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Fujifilm X-Pro1 (2013, documented use). In 2013, for a WSJ Magazine commission, Eggleston used a Fujifilm X-Pro1 to photograph part of his camera collection. The article noted that the X-Pro1 appealed to him for being "a very rangefinder-like camera." This is a documented, one-off use — the X-Pro1 is not part of his established working practice, and he has stated that he knows little about digital photography.
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| Fuji X-Pro 1 |
Film
Kodachrome 25 ASA — his early colour film stock. In a Frieze magazine interview, Eggleston confirmed that his early colour work was shot on 25 ASA Kodachrome, explaining that faster colour film simply did not yet exist when he began. Kodachrome 25, Kodak's slowest and finest-grained colour reversal film, required bright light or steady subjects — it is the film that defines the particular quality of saturated, precise colour in his images from the 1960s and 1970s. Its characteristic rendering — warm, saturated, with a quality of weight and stillness — is inseparable from the look of the work that made his reputation.
Printing: Dye-Transfer and Pigment Prints
Dye-transfer printing — the process central to his most celebrated work. Eggleston discovered dye transfer in 1973 while teaching at Harvard. The process, which had been developed for high-end commercial colour printing — advertising, product photography, magazine reproduction — uses three separate colour-separation matrices (cyan, magenta, and yellow, plus black) to transfer dye sequentially onto a mordanted receiving sheet, producing prints of exceptional colour fidelity, depth, and archival stability. He has described seeing what it was capable of as revelatory: "That is what got me interested." His MoMA prints were made by a Chicago lab using this process, at a cost of several hundred dollars per print and a minimum of three days per image. The resulting prints — rich, saturated, with a physical depth that no other photographic process then available could match — gave his colour work an authority that its critics could not dismiss on grounds of the medium.
After Kodak discontinued the paper required for dye transfer, Eggleston moved to large-format pigment printing, describing the transition in his own words: "We decided to experiment with printing a photograph at 44 by 60 inches in a new pigment print process." Of the resulting prints, he said: "It was a different animal, and it didn't reflect on demeaning the dye transfer." His most recent exhibition series, The Last Dyes (David Zwirner, 2024–2025), presents the final dye-transfer prints made before the process became truly impossible to continue.
Technique and Style
Eggleston's photographic method is deceptively simple: he carries a camera at all times, photographs whatever he finds worth photographing, and takes one frame per subject — never a second shot. "I only take one frame of each picture and then it is over so quickly." This is not a discipline imposed from outside but a reflection of his understanding of what photography is: a single, irreversible encounter with the world. The idea of returning to reshoot is, for him, a category error.
He frequently shoots without looking through the viewfinder — "I quite frequently don't look through the camera" — years of working with a single focal length having given him an internalised sense of how the frame will appear. The camera becomes less an optical instrument than an extension of the eye, its frame already known.
His principle of the "democratic" approach — his own word for it, as he explained in Interview Magazine — holds that everything in the world is equally worthy of being photographed: "It was just there, and I was interested in it." A red ceiling, a tricycle in a driveway, a friend sleeping on a sofa, a supermarket aisle: no subject is elevated above another. This is not indifference but a form of radical attention, derived partly from his early absorption of Robert Frank's refusal to distinguish between high and low subjects, and developed into something entirely his own.
His use of colour is structural, not decorative. He has said that most colour films are filled with "irresponsible uses of colour" — colour applied without thought to what it does within the frame. In his images, colour is the primary relationship: the red of a ceiling against the warm light below it; the green of a suburban lawn against a specific shade of sky. He described making this up without precedent: "I just... made it up."
He rejects the idea that the results are accidental: "I don't think mine's accidental a bit." He adds, though, that he does enjoy making photographs look accidental — which captures the essential tension in his work between its apparent casualness and the precision underneath it.
How to Shoot Like William Eggleston
Commit to one frame. His discipline of taking a single exposure per subject concentrates attention entirely on the moment of shooting, not on the safety net of multiple attempts. Try applying this constraint to a day's shooting and observe how it changes your relationship to the moment of pressing the shutter.
Treat everything as equally worthy of your attention. His democratic principle is harder than it sounds — it requires actively resisting the tendency to reach for the "interesting" subject and instead remaining open to whatever is actually in front of you. Walk through familiar territory as if seeing it for the first time, without a predetermined hierarchy of subjects.
Learn your focal length so well you no longer need the viewfinder. His ability to shoot without looking through the camera is the product of years of working at a single focal length. Commit to one lens for an extended period — not days but months — until the frame is as natural as your field of vision.
Think about colour as a structural relationship, not an effect. Before shooting, identify the dominant colour relationship in the scene: what colour is in tension with what, and where. Eggleston's images work because the colours within the frame are in specific, considered proportion to each other. If you are thinking about colour at the processing stage rather than the shooting stage, you are working backwards.
Consider how the print will carry the image. His investment in dye transfer and then large-format pigment printing was never incidental — the physical richness of the print is part of how the image works. If your work exists only on screen, consider what a physical print would do to it.
Books by William Eggleston
William Eggleston's Guide (MoMA, 1976) — The book that changed colour photography. Published to accompany his landmark MoMA exhibition, it remains one of the most studied and influential photography books of the twentieth century.
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| See it at Amazon |
The Democratic Forest (Doubleday, 1989) — A vast survey of his work from across the American South, with an introduction by Eudora Welty. The title names the principle that organises all his work.
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| See it at Amazon |
Faulkner's Mississippi (Oxmoor House, 1990) — Photographs of the Mississippi landscape and communities associated with William Faulkner, with text by Willie Morris.
Ancient and Modern (Random House, 1992) — A further survey, with an introduction by Mark Holborn, drawing on work from across his career.
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| See it at Amazon |
Los Alamos (Scalo, 2003) — Work made during road trips across the American West and South in the 1960s and 1970s, much of it unseen for decades. The title comes from the New Mexico town where the atomic bomb was developed — a characteristic Eggleston non-sequitur that refuses to explain itself.
The Outlands (David Zwirner Books, 2021) — Recent work, continuing his sustained engagement with the ordinary landscapes of the American South.
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| See it at Amazon |
Mystery of the Ordinary (David Zwirner Books, 2023) — A late-career survey accompanying his C/O Berlin retrospective.
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| See it at Amazon |
The Last Dyes (David Zwirner Books, 2024) — The final dye-transfer prints, presented as a definitive document of a process that can no longer be continued.
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| See it at Amazon |
Where to See William Eggleston's Work
- Eggleston Foundation : https://egglestonartfoundation.org/— the authoritative source for his estate and archival work.
- David Zwirner: davidzwirner.com/artists/william-eggleston — his gallery, with exhibition history and available works.
- MoMA: moma.org — holds the 1976 exhibition prints and subsequent acquisitions; a central institution for his work.
- Collections: Whitney Museum of American Art, Guggenheim Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Victoria and Albert Museum (London), SFMOMA, Centre Pompidou (Paris).
Conclusion
William Eggleston shoots with Leica rangefinder cameras and a compact 35mm system descended from his first Canon rangefinder, using the smallest and most inconspicuous equipment he can find. His early colour work was made on Kodachrome 25 ASA, and the prints that defined his reputation were produced through dye-transfer printing — a process of extraordinary colour depth that he discovered in 1973 and pursued for five decades, until it was no longer possible to continue.
His method is as spare as the equipment: one frame per subject, often without looking through the viewfinder, with complete attention given to the colour relationships already present in the scene. The world he photographs — gas stations, suburban interiors, friends, strangers, the unremarkable geography of the American South — has not changed. What he showed, over fifty years of persistent, disciplined looking, is that it was never ordinary to begin with.
"I am at war with the obvious."
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