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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
Whether
Experience
Else
Photo
Anything
Abstraction
Music
Peculiar
Might
Ultimately
Photographer
Drawing

More quotes by 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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I quite frequently don't look through the camera, which is very close to being blind.
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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Often people ask what I'm photographing, which is a hard question to answer. And the best what I've come up with is I just say: Life today.
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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I don't think about what camera I should use that much. I just pick up the one that looks nicest on the day.
William Eggleston
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I would play music every day from the time I was about 4 or 5 years old. Every time I would go from one end of the house to the other, I would pass the piano and play a few notes.
William Eggleston
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I don't like reading music. It's like learning a language. You can't read music proficiently overnight. It takes time, it's boring work.
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 don't look at other photographs much at all. I don't know why. I study my own a lot.
William Eggleston
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Generally, that's what happens-a fundamental rotting of the idea. They woke up with the wrong idea. It's just like music: If you don't have an innate love or calling for it, then no matter how much you study or how well you can play by looking at the score, it doesn't mean that you're going to make really good music.
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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I am at war with the obvious.
William Eggleston
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You become technically proficient whether you want to or not, the more you take pictures.
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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Half voluntarily, half Winston's older brother [William] would take me in, saying, Daddy, I think you oughta do this. And I'd say, I think you're right, maybe I do need it. Sometimes a week later I'd leave the place sometimes I'd stick it out for a month.
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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You can take a good picture of anything. A bad one, too.
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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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