Gibbes Museum of Art, Charleston
February 2022
February 25–October 9, 2022 William Eggleston’s unique ability to conflate the epic and the everyday has made him one of the most impactful figures in late twentieth-century photography. A native of Memphis, Tennessee, William Eggleston first photographed his local environs in the 1950s in black and white, but became one of the first fine-art photographers to use color to record his observations in a more heightened and accurate way. Today, his strikingly vivid yet enigmatic images of parked cars, billboards, storefronts, diners, and other artifacts of the ordinary world are considered groundbreaking. The photographs presented in this edition of the Gibbes Museum’s Charleston Collects exhibition series are selected from the Laura and Jay Crouse Collection and represent many of the pioneering artist’s most notable works. This exhibition is accompanied by a full-color catalogue with an essay on the artist by Simon Constantine, a lecturer on the history of photography at Birkbeck, University of London, and a long-standing consultant lecturer for Sotheby’s Institute of Art, London.