Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

William Eggleston
Age: 85
Born: 1939
Born: July 27
Artist
Photographer
Memphis
Tennessee
Bill Eggleston
Smoking
Things
Photographer
Drinking
Photography
Gets
Common
House
Teller
Women

More quotes by William Eggleston

Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
You can take a good picture of anything. A bad one, too.
William Eggleston
Image
Only the few times I've been to so-called treatment centers, which were a complete waste of money and useless. I didn't know what I was doing at the time, because I was always drunk when I checked in.
William Eggleston
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I quite frequently don't look through the camera, which is very close to being blind.
William Eggleston
Image
I knew it was happening, but I never paid much attention to it . . . just to the passage of time. Something new always slowly changes right in front of your eyes - it just happens.
William Eggleston
Image
I am at war with the obvious.
William Eggleston
Image
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
Image
I don't look at other photographs much at all. I don't know why. I study my own a lot.
William Eggleston
Image
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
Image
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
Image
There is no particular reason to search for meaning.
William Eggleston
Image
I've also never had favorite pictures. Or subjects. I have this discipline of treating everything equally-I used to say democratically.
William Eggleston
Image
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
Image
It quickly came to be that I grew interested in photographing whatever was there wherever I happened to be. For any reason.
William Eggleston
Image
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
Image
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