Exhibition of Photographs by William Eggleston at Edward Cella Art + Architecture

LOS ANGELES, CA.- Edward Cella Art + Architecture presents an exhibition of photographs by noted photographer William Eggleston. Entitled William Eggleston: American Photographer, the exhibition presents a rich offering of unique and historic prints dating from 1965 through 1985 including several of Eggleston’s most iconic images. Designed to present insights into the photographer’s working methods and philosophy, the exhibition is especially timely as it runs concurrently with William Eggleston: Democratic Camera Photographs and Video, 1961-2008 presented by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and with William Eggleston: On the Road presented by dnj Gallery. 

Eggleston is widely recognized as one of the most important photographers of the 20th century owing to his innovative and unconventional approach to composition and early adoption and mastery of color photography. Over a more than thirty-year career, the artist’s selection of seemingly commonplace subject matter lays bare the fleeting qualities of human existence while offering a tender compendium of his home, the American South. Eggleston offers epiphany-like insight into the everyday. The interplay of opulent color and nonchalant forms in Eggleston’s photographs honors his subjects while providing an additional layer of meaning, turning them into stunning visual metaphors of an alienated world. 

With an eye not to glorify the world in front of his lens, but with the intent to show things for what they really look like, Eggleston states, “I think I had often wondered what other things see — if they saw like we see. And I’ve tried to make a lot of different photographs as if a human did not take them.” Refining this idea, exhibition curator, Carole Thompson, notes, “Eggleston’s color images flaunt their apparent formlessness. Although the artist acknowledges a debt to Henri Cartier- Bresson, his photographs reject Bresson’s decisive moments.” 

Representing a collaboration between Carole Thompson Fine Art and Edward Cella Art + Architecture, the exhibition of more than forty vintage photographs begins with several one-of-a- kind black-and-white, hand-developed photographs of the 1960s and also includes pristine examples of the vivid dye transfer work of the early 1970s. To Eggleston, the richness of photography stems from the unexpected and uncontrollable, and the exhibition’s inclusion of the artist’s first experiments in color photography, unique Chromogenic-coupler prints developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s, document his breakthrough with impromptu encounters with various individuals and scenes. Comprehensive in nature yet approachable in scale, the exhibition features selected prints from six of the artist’s influential series, including the landmark 1976 catalogue, William Eggleston’s Guide, Los Alamos project, and, for the first time in Los Angeles, offers examples from the artist’s Berlin Series. His oeuvre has profoundly influenced generations of photographers, as well as critics, curators, writers, cinematographers and filmmakers.