Every Picture Tells a Story Don't It?

William Eggleston: Born in Memphis in 1939, he was brought up in pampered gentility on the family cotton farm in Mississippi (even before his prints began to sell, money was never a problem). A quiet child fond of music, he was sent to toughen up at boarding school and detested it, later drifting through a series of educational establishments while neglecting to acquire a degree. One thing he did work hard on was his reputation as a hellraiser, in the most impeccable southern mode. One legend has him driving in search of late-night whiskey, ramming his Cadillac through locked steel gates with Bach’s Mass in B Minor blaring from the stereo. Only when he came across a copy of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s famous book The Decisive Moment, some time around 1960, did he realise that he could take photography as seriously as having fun.

For most viewers, Cartier-Bresson’s genius is compositional, residing in his matchless ability to seize crystalline form from the fast-moving muddle of the everyday. Eggleston, however, was more fascinated by the sophisticated tonal properties of the photographs in The Decisive Moment: their interlocking play of light and shade, the way even the darkest shadows contained reservoirs of meaning. When he discovered Kodachrome film in 1967, Eggleston sensed that colour might do something similar for him, and went to work with his Leica and Canon rangefinders. He turned up later outside Szarkowski’s office at MoMA with a suitcase full of prints and slides.