William Eggleston - Photographs New York Wednesday, October 11, 2023 | Phillips

Create your first list.

Select an existing list or create a new list to share and manage lots you follow.

  • When Photographs by William Eggleston opened at The Museum of Modern Art, New York on May 24, 1976, it and its accompanying publication, William Eggleston’s Guide, emphatically ushered in a new era of fine art photography. As MoMA’s first exhibition and book dedicated to color photography, it was a defiant statement that the medium did not have to emulate painting, either in palette or subject, to be worthy of a place on the museum's walls. Instead, it could be its own distinct visual language for sharing an artist’s viewpoint on the world; for Eggleston, this meant “photographing whatever was there wherever I happened to be. For any reason.”

     

    William Eggleston’s Guide, exhibition catalogue (1976)

    In the original exhibition of 75 photographs, Memphis was unassumingly hung as the second print in a row of five; however, as the cover illustration for the book it quickly set itself apart as the hallmark image from the groundbreaking show. Photographed from a low vantage point, the blue-green metal frame, bright red handlebars, and well-worn tires of the tricycle dominate the frame, dwarfing the suburban setting behind it. Its monumental presence is enhanced by the deeply saturated colors of the dye transfer process and forces the audience to reconsider an object that everyone has seen but perhaps never really looked at. Speaking of the image for an interview in conjunction with his 2009 exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Eggleston recounted its origin story:

    “I was searching around a pretty barren suburban neighborhood in Memphis for no particular reason, in a place I’m not familiar with. And this is a row of typical houses. And this was just sitting in the street near the curb and I was sitting on the curb looking at it . . . and rested the camera on the curb and using something like my wallet to cushion it . . . i think I had a sense to know that it was not so interesting to stand at normal standing height and look down at this thing. So I got down level with it.”
    —William Eggleston

    Memphis continues to be Eggleston’s most iconic work of art and prints of the image are in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

     

    Photographs by William Eggleston, Exhibition Installation, Museum of Modern Art, 1976
    • Provenance

      Collection of the Artist
      Private Collection
      Gallery of Contemporary Photography (ROSEGALLERY), Santa Monica
      Olivier Renaud Clement, New York, as agent
      Private Collection, early 2000s

    • Literature

      Szarkowski, William Eggleston's Guide, p. 81 and front cover
      Thames & Hudson, William Eggleston, pl. 94
      Yale University Press, William Eggleston: Democratic Camera: Photographs and Video, 1961-2008, pl. 22, p. 67
      Cincinnati Art Museum/Hatje Cantz, Starburst: Color Photography in America, 1970-1980, pl. 138, p. 159
      Dexter and Weski, Cruel and Tender: The Real in the Twentieth-Century Photograph, p. 151
      The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Photography's Last Century: The Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee Collection, p. 86
      Davis, An American Century of Photography, from Dry-Plate to Digital, p. 471

    • Artist Biography

      William Eggleston

      American • 1939

      William Eggleston's highly saturated, vivid images, predominantly capturing the American South, highlight the beauty and lush diversity in the unassuming everyday. Although influenced by legends of street photography Robert Frank and Henri Cartier-Bresson, Eggleston broke away from traditional black and white photography and started experimenting with color in the late 1960s.

      At the time, color photography was widely associated with the commercial rather than fine art — something that Eggleston sought to change. His 1976 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, Color Photographs, fundamentally shifted how color photography was viewed within an art context, ushering in institutional acceptance and helping to ensure Eggleston's significant legacy in the history of photography.

      View More Works

117

Memphis

circa 1969
Dye transfer print, printed circa 1970.
12 x 17 1/4 in. (30.5 x 43.8 cm)
Signed in pencil on the verso.

Full Cataloguing

Estimate
$250,000 - 350,000 

Sold for $317,500

Contact Specialist

Sarah Krueger
Head of Department, Photographs
skrueger@phillips.com

 

Vanessa Hallett
Worldwide Head of Photographs and Chairwoman, Americas
vhallett@phillips.com

Photographs

New York Auction 11 October 2023