William Eggleston was born in Memphis, Tennessee and raised in Sumner, Mississippi. His father was an engineer who had a failed career as a cotton farmer, and his mother was the daughter of a prominent local judge. As a boy, Eggleston was introverted and enjoyed playing the piano, drawing, and working with electronics. From an early age, he was drawn to visual media; he reportedly enjoyed buying postcards and cutting out pictures from magazines. Eggleston was also interested in audio technology as a child.
At the age of fifteen, Eggleston was sent to the Webb School, a boarding school on Bell Buckle, Tennessee. Eggleston later had few fond memories of the school, saying to a reporter, "It had a kind of Spartan routine to 'build character.' I never knew what that was supposed to mean. It was so callous and dumb. It was the kind of place where it was considered effeminate to like music and painting." Eggleston was unusual among his peers in that he eschewed typical Southern male pursuits such as hunting and sports, in favor of artistic pursuits and observation of the world around him.
Eggleston attended Vanderbilt University for a year, Delta State College for a semester, and the University of Mississippi (Ole Miss) for approximately five years, never earning a college degree. However, it was during college that his interest in photography took root; during his first year in college, a friend gave Eggleston a Leica camera. Eggleston took art classes at Ole Miss and was introduced to abstract expressionism by a visiting painter from New York named Tom Young.
In 1970, Eggleston's friend William Christenberry introduced him to Walter Hopps, director of Washington, D.C.'s Corcoran Gallery. Hopps later said he was "stunned" by Eggleston's work:"I had never seen anything like it."
Eggleston taught at Harvard in 1973 and 1974, and it was during this period when he discovered dye-transfer printing when he was examining the price list of a photographic lab in Chicago. As Eggleston later recalled: "It advertised 'from the cheapest to the ultimate print.' The ultimate print was a dye-transfer. I went straight up there to look and everything I saw was commercial work like pictures of cigarette packs or perfume bottles but the colour saturation and the quality of the ink was overwhelming. I couldn't wait to see what a plain Eggleston picture would look like with the same process. Every photograph I subsequently printed with the process seemed fantastic and each one seemed better than the previous one." The dye-transfer process resulted in some of Eggleston's most striking and famous work, such as his 1973 photograph entitled The Red Ceiling, of which Eggleston said, "The Red Ceiling is so powerful, that in fact I've never seen it reproduced on the page to my satisfaction. When you look at the dye it is like red blood that's wet on the wall.... A little red is usually enough, but to work with an entire red surface was a challenge."
At Harvard Eggleston prepared his first portfolio, entitled 14 Pictures (1974). This portfolio was comprised of dye-transfer prints. Eggleston's work was featured in an exhibition at MOMA in 1976, which was accompanied by the volume William Eggleston's Guide. The MOMA show is regarded as a watershed moment in the history of photography, by marking "the acceptance of colour photography by the highest validating institution" (in the words of Mark Holborn). Eggleston's was the first one-person exhibition of colour photographs in the history of MOMA.
Around the time of his 1976 MOMA exhibition, Eggleston was introduced to Viva, the Andy Warhol "superstar," with whom he began a long relationship. During this period Eggleston became familiar with Andy Warhol's circle, a connection that may have helped foster Eggleston's idea of the "democratic camera," Mark Holborn suggests. Also in the seventies, Eggleston experimented with video, producing several hours of roughly edited footage Eggleston calls Stranded in Canton. Writer Richard Woodward, who has viewed the footage, likens it to a "demented home movie," mixing tender shots of his children at home with shots of drunken parties, public urination and a man biting off a chicken's head before a cheering crowd in New Orleans. Woodward suggests that the film is reflective of Eggleston's "fearless naturalism-a belief that by looking patiently at what others ignore or look away from, interesting things can be seen"
