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.
At the age of fifteen, Eggleston was sent to the Webb School, a boarding school on Bell Buckle, Tennessee. He 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.
Eggleston's early photographic efforts were inspired by the work of Swiss-born photographer Robert Frank and by French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson's book, The Decisive Moment. At first photographing in black-and-white, Eggleston began experimenting with color photography in 1965 and 1966, and color transparency film became his dominant medium in the late sixties. Eggleston's development as a photographer seems to have taken place in relative isolation from other artists.
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. 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. 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 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."
