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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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William Eggleston
Age: 85
Born: 1939
Born: July 27
Artist
Photographer
Memphis
Tennessee
Bill Eggleston
Person
Seen
Photojournalism
Firsts
Called
Immensely
First
Interest
Photos
Good
Art
Respected
Life
Didn
Magazine
Like
Stills
Magazines
Bresson
Still
Places
Henri
Persons
Either
Cartier

More quotes by William Eggleston

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You can take a good picture of anything. A bad one, too.
William Eggleston
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Unfortunately they're practically all dead. And many were my closest associates: friends, co-directors, whatever you want to say - my partners in crime.
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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.
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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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I am at war with the obvious.
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 would go there quite frequently. I met and became close with John Szarkowski of the Museum of Modern Art. He was incredibly supportive about me working in color.
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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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 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 have a burning desire to go out and document anything. It just happens when it happens. It's not a conscious effort, nor is it a struggle. Wouldn't do it if it was. The idea of the suffering artist has never appealed to me. Being here is suffering enough.
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
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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 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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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 quite frequently don't look through the camera, which is very close to being blind.
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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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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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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A person can attack that bottle of vodka and drink it like it's a bottle of cold water. Two of my wife's girlfriends died from drinking. They weren't big pill-takers they were drinkers. So it can't be so simple as to slide away, like Marilyn Monroe.
William Eggleston