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William Eggleston

Thoroughly enjoyed this easy to read essay on William Eggleston, the man behind the 'Democratic Camera'. Here's a snippet;

In an attempt to summarize the basic philosophy behind The Democratic Forest, William Eggleston once stated, ‘I had this notion of what I called a democratic way of looking around: that nothing was more important or less important.’  As the recent retrospective at the Whitney, ‘William Eggleston: Democratic Camera – Photographs and Video, 1961-2008’, attests, such a perspective was not intended as a particularly rebellious or directly political attack on established hierarchies (after all, this is a gentleman who, despite his hell-raiser reputation, takes great pride in the fact that he has never owned a pair of blue jeans).  Instead, Eggleston’s ‘democratic’ outlook is a rather traditional and thoroughly romantic understanding of the artist as, quite literally, a visionary, who can summon something out of nothing, or conversely, distil a fundamental essence from the chaos of everything.  Over the course of nearly fifty years, Eggleston has shown that through the medium of photography, time, light, the physical world, and most famously color can be composed in such a way that it not only mesmerizes an audience visually, but also affects each individual emotionally, often in a profoundly subtle, primal and breathtaking manner.