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Whether a photo or music, or a drawing or anything else I might do—it’s ultimately all an abstraction of my peculiar experience.

William Eggleston

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William Eggleston
Age: 85
Born: 1939
Born: July 27
Artist
Photographer
Memphis
Tennessee
Bill Eggleston
Might
Ultimately
Photographer
Drawing
Whether
Experience
Else
Photo
Anything
Abstraction
Music
Peculiar

More quotes by William Eggleston

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Whatever it is about pictures, photographs, it's just about impossible to follow up with words. They don't have anything to do with each other.
William Eggleston
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It was something new that was happening everywhere. You couldn't miss it. If you needed to go to the grocery you would go to the predecessors of the big supermarkets of today.
William Eggleston
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I’ve always assumed that the abstract qualities of [my] photographs are obvious. For instance, I can turn them upside down and they’re still interesting to me as pictures. If you turn a picture that’s not well organized upside down, it won’t work.
William Eggleston
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The immediate reviews were very hostile, but they didn't bother me-I had the attitude that I was right. The poor guys who were critics just didn't understand the works at all. I was sorry about that, but it didn't weigh on my mind a bit.
William Eggleston
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I've also never had favorite pictures. Or subjects. I have this discipline of treating everything equally-I used to say democratically.
William Eggleston
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I had this notion of what I called a democratic way of looking around, that nothing was more or less important.
William Eggleston
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I have some that I have become a well-known-even infamous-client of, mostly in Memphis. But a great deal of that is legend and doesn't have anything to do with truth.
William Eggleston
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I am at war with the obvious.
William Eggleston
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I had the attitude that I would work with this present-day material and do the best I could to describe it with photography, not intending to make any particular comment about whether it was good or bad or whether I liked it or not. It was just there, and I was interested in it. That's what I still do today.
William Eggleston
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My friend who I went to boarding school with was interested in photography. He insisted that I buy a camera and marched me downtown.
William Eggleston
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There's plenty of film out there, and quadrillions of cameras that use film - I don't think it makes much sense not to use it. The thing that's going out is the manufacturing of the paper. Incidentally, all these years my wife has told me that I'm color-blind.
William Eggleston
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You can take a good picture of anything. A bad one, too.
William Eggleston
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And what we called photojournalism, the photos seen in places like Life magazine, didn't interest me either. They were just not good-there was no art there. The first person who I respected immensely was Henri Cartier-Bresson. I still do.
William Eggleston
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Black-and-white photography, which I was doing in the very early days, was essentially called art photography and usually consisted of landscapes by people like Ansel Adams and Edward Weston. But photographs by people like Adams didn't interest me.
William Eggleston
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Many people one meets in life somehow think they know you simply because they're hanging out at the same counter-but they really don't know a thing about you.
William Eggleston
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Well, probably the best way to put it might be that at some time, not just in an instant, but over some period of time I became aware of the fact that I wanted to document examples like Kroger or Piggly Wiggly in the late '50s, early '60s.
William Eggleston
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I only ever take one picture of one thing. Literally. Never two. So then that picture is taken and then the next one is waiting somewhere else.
William Eggleston
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It quickly came to be that I grew interested in photographing whatever was there wherever I happened to be. For any reason.
William Eggleston
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I think with being blind the one thing you would have going is that you could still feel things, see your way around so to speak. And if you had had the experience of seeing at one time in your life, then you would know what it was like and be able to function. I've said this before, I think I could really photograph blind if I had to.
William Eggleston
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I want to make a picture that could stand on its own, regardless of what it was a picture of. I've never been a bit interested in the fact that this was a picture of a blues musician or a street corner or something.
William Eggleston