William Eggleston Quotes

Quotes about:

• Often people ask what I'm photographing, which is a hard question to answer. And the best what I've come up with is I just say: Life today.

  William Eggleston

  Photography, People, Answers

  106 Copy quote

• 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.

  William Eggleston

  Photography, Struggle, Artist

  "Out of the ordinary" by Sean O'Hagan, www.theguardian.com. July 24, 2004.

  114 Copy quote

• I am at war with the obvious.

  William Eggleston

  Photography, War, Photographer

  William Eggleston, Gunilla Knape, Hasselblad Center (1999). “William Eggleston”

  60 Copy quote

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

  William Eggleston

  Important, Way, Photographer

  53 Copy quote

• A picture is what it is and I've never noticed that it helps to talk about them, or answer specific questions about them, much less volunteer information in words. It wouldn't make any sense to explain them. Kind of diminishes them. People always want to know when something was taken, where it was taken, and, God knows, why it was taken. It gets really ridiculous. I mean, they're right there, whatever they are.

  William Eggleston

  Taken, Mean, People

  "Out of the ordinary" by Sean O'Hagan, www.theguardian.com. July 24, 2004.

  48 Copy quote

• I only ever take one picture of one thing. Literally. Never two. So then that picture is taken and then the next one is waiting somewhere else.

  William Eggleston

  Taken, Somewhere Else, Two

  "Out of the ordinary". Interview with Sean O'Hagan, www.theguardian.com. July 24, 2004.

  45 Copy quote

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

  William Eggleston

  Photographer

  31 Copy quote

• 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.

  William Eggleston

  Impossible, Photograph, Follow Up

  42 Copy quote

• There is no particular reason to search for meaning.

  William Eggleston

  Photographer, Reason, Search For Meaning

  38 Copy quote

• Photography just gets us out of the house.

  William Eggleston

  Photography, House, Photographer

  32 Copy quote

• I don't think about what camera I should use that much. I just pick up the one that looks nicest on the day.

  William Eggleston

  Thinking, Cameras, Looks

  56 Copy quote

• It quickly came to be that I grew interested in photographing whatever was there wherever I happened to be. For any reason.

  William Eggleston

  Reason, Grew, Happened

  "Out of the ordinary" by Sean O'Hagan, www.theguardian.com. July 24, 2004.

  37 Copy quote

• I want to make a picture that could stand on its own, regardless of what it was a picture of. I've never been a bit interested in the fact that this was a picture of a blues musician or a street corner or something.

  William Eggleston

  Musician, Want, Facts

  21 Copy quote

• Black-and-white photography, which I was doing in the very early days, was essentially called art photography and usually consisted of landscapes by people like Ansel Adams and Edward Weston. But photographs by people like Adams didn't interest me.

  William Eggleston

  Photography, Art, Black And White

  Interview with Harmony Korine, www.interviewmagazine.com. November 21, 2008.

  17 Copy quote

• I am afraid that there are more people than I can imagine who can go no further than appreciating a picture that is a rectangle with an object in the middle of it, which they can identify.

  William Eggleston

  People, Appreciate, Photographer

  17 Copy quote

• I’ve always assumed that the abstract qualities of [my] photographs are obvious. For instance, I can turn them upside down and they’re still interesting to me as pictures. If you turn a picture that’s not well organized upside down, it won’t work.

  William Eggleston

  Interesting, Quality, Down And

  24 Copy quote

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

  William Eggleston

  Looks, Study, Photograph

  12 Copy quote

• I like to photograph democratically.

  William Eggleston

  Photograph

  4 Copy quote

• We have a few things in common - smoking, drinking, and women. Photography just gets us out of the house. (To photographer Juergen Teller)

  William Eggleston

  Photography, Drinking, House

  39 Copy quote

• Generally, that's what happens-a fundamental rotting of the idea. They woke up with the wrong idea. It's just like music: If you don't have an innate love or calling for it, then no matter how much you study or how well you can play by looking at the score, it doesn't mean that you're going to make really good music.

  William Eggleston

  Mean, Play, Ideas

  Interview with Harmony Korine, www.interviewmagazine.com. November 21, 2008.

  31 Copy quote

• I think with being blind the one thing you would have going is that you could still feel things, see your way around so to speak. And if you had had the experience of seeing at one time in your life, then you would know what it was like and be able to function. I've said this before, I think I could really photograph blind if I had to.

  William Eggleston

  Thinking, Able, Way

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

  17 Copy quote

• And what we called photojournalism, the photos seen in places like Life magazine, didn't interest me either. They were just not good-there was no art there. The first person who I respected immensely was Henri Cartier-Bresson. I still do.

  William Eggleston

  Art, Magazines, Firsts

  Interview with Harmony Korine, www.interviewmagazine.com. November 21, 2008.

  18 Copy quote

• Well, probably the best way to put it might be that at some time, not just in an instant, but over some period of time I became aware of the fact that I wanted to document examples like Kroger or Piggly Wiggly in the late '50s, early '60s.

  William Eggleston

  Example, Might, Way

  Interview with Harmony Korine, www.interviewmagazine.com. November 21, 2008.

  16 Copy quote

• Many people one meets in life somehow think they know you simply because they're hanging out at the same counter-but they really don't know a thing about you.

  William Eggleston

  Thinking, People, Hanging Out

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

  4 Copy quote

• A lot of my friends were mostly working in black-and-white-people like Lee Friedlander, Diane Arbus, Garry Winogrand, and others. We would exchange prints with each other, and they were always very supportive of what I was doing. What each of us was doing photographically was entirely different, but we were basically coming from the same place, sort of like a club.

  William Eggleston

  Black And White, People, Supportive

  Interview with Harmony Korine, www.interviewmagazine.com. November 21, 2008.

  7 Copy quote

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