Oxford School of Photography

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William Eggleston to receive Outstanding Contribution to Photography award

1 Comment Posted by oxfordschoolofphotography on April 10, 2013

The BJP tells us that William Eggleston is to be awarded a prize for his outstanding contribution to photography, can’t even think what his honest response to that might be…..try any of these

I don’t have a burning desire to go out and document anything. It just happens when it happens. It’s not a conscious effort, nor is it a struggle. Wouldn’t do it if it was. The idea of the suffering artist has never appealed to me. Being here is suffering enough.

You can take a good picture of anything. A bad one, too.

Whatever it is about pictures, photographs, it’s just about impossible to follow up with words. They don’t have anything to do with each other.

I had this notion of what I called a democratic way of looking around, that nothing was more or less important.

I am at war with the obvious.

I don’t look at other photographs much at all. I don’t know why. I study my own a lot.

There is no particular reason to search for meaning.

The way I have always looked at it is the world is in color. And there’s nothing we can do about that.

“Recognised today as the pioneer of colour photography and the personal documentary style, William Eggleston has been producing cutting-edge work for over 50 years,” say the organisers of the Sony World Photography Awards, which has selected the US photographer at this year’s recipient of the Outstanding Contribution to Photography award.

Untitled. 1695-1968 fr. Los Alamos, Beehive. Image © William Eggleston, Eggleston Artistic Trust, courtesy of Gagosian Gallery.