William Eggleston

No one, perhaps, has ever been as defiant about colour, as William Eggleston. No one, also, has been as criticised. Raj Lalwani writes.

- Raj Lalwani

William Eggleston and Ansel Adams did not know each other, but the respective pillars of colour and black and white did not seem to like each other much. “If you can’t make it good, make it red,” Adams had said, decades ago, while weighing in on what is arguably Eggleston’s most famous photograph, that of a hallucinogenically red ceiling. “We didn’t know each other,” said Eggleston of Adams, in a 2016 interview to the New York Times, “but if we did, I’d tell him the same thing... I hate your work.”

Of Cartier-Bresson, interestingly, Eggleston is part derisive, but mostly reverential, for it was Bresson who formed Eggleston’s early awakening to the power of the print. “I had picked up The Decisive Moment years ago when I was already making prints, so the first thing I noticed was the tonal quality of the black and white. There were no shadow areas that were totally black, where you couldn’t make out what was in them, and there were no totally white areas. It was only later that I was struck by the wonderful, correct, composition and framing. This was apparent through the tones of the printed book. I later found some actual prints of the same pictures in New York. They were nothing—just ordinary looking photographs, but they were the same pictures I had worshipped and idolised, yet I wouldn’t have given ten cents for them. I still go back to the book every couple of years and I know it is the tones that make the composition come across.”