About the Artist
William Eggleston
William Eggleston (b. 1939) is an American photographer known for elevating color photography as a legitimate art form. Born in Memphis and raised in Mississippi, he was influenced by Robert Frank and Henri Cartier-Bresson. Working largely in isolation, Eggleston gained early recognition when MoMA curator John Szarkowski encountered his vivid color prints in 1969. Eggleston began teaching at Harvard in the early 1970s, where he discovered dye-transfer printing—a technique that brought extraordinary richness to his work. This process produced some of his most iconic images, including The Red Ceiling (1973), which he described as “like red blood that’s wet on the wall.”
