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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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William Eggleston
Age: 85
Born: 1939
Born: July 27
Artist
Photographer
Memphis
Tennessee
Bill Eggleston
Ends
Music
Play
Every
Years
Piano
Would
Notes
Time
Pass
House
More quotes by William Eggleston
You can take a good picture of anything. A bad one, too.
William Eggleston
I had this notion of what I called a democratic way of looking around, that nothing was more or less important.
William Eggleston
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
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
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
Unfortunately they're practically all dead. And many were my closest associates: friends, co-directors, whatever you want to say - my partners in crime.
William Eggleston
We have a few things in common - smoking, drinking, and women. Photography just gets us out of the house. (To photographer Juergen Teller)
William Eggleston
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
I've also never had favorite pictures. Or subjects. I have this discipline of treating everything equally-I used to say democratically.
William Eggleston
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
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
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
It quickly came to be that I grew interested in photographing whatever was there wherever I happened to be. For any reason.
William Eggleston
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
