id: 154843
accession number: 1989.421
share license status: Copyrighted
url: https://clevelandart.org/art/1989.421
updated: 2024-03-26 02:00:06.786000
Sumner, Mississippi, Cassidy Bayou in Background, 1972. William Eggleston (American, 1939-). Dye transfer print; image: 28 x 43.2 cm (11 x 17 in.); paper: 45.5 x 58.2 cm (17 15/16 x 22 15/16 in.); matted: 50.8 x 61 cm (20 x 24 in.). The Cleveland Museum of Art, Gift of Museum members in 1989 1989.421 © 1972 Eggleston Artistic Trust. All rights reserved. Used by permission.
title: Sumner, Mississippi, Cassidy Bayou in Background
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creation date: 1972
creation date earliest: 1972
creation date latest: 1972
current location:
creditline: Gift of Museum members in 1989
copyright: © 1972 Eggleston Artistic Trust. All rights reserved. Used by permission.
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culture: America, 20th century
technique: dye transfer print
department: Photography
collection: PH - American 1951-Present
type: Photograph
find spot:
catalogue raisonne:
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CREATORS
* William Eggleston (American, 1939-) - artist
William Eggleston American, 1939-
William Eggleston took a serious interest in photography when he discovered the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson and Walker Evans while a student at Vanderbilt University in 1962. Like Cartier-Bresson, Eggleston's photographs rely heavily on ironic formal juxtapositions, with the added consideration of color. His work also depends on the banality of his subjects: the familiar people and places of his native Memphis and northern Mississippi. Like snapshots, his photographs are candid and commonplace, though they lack the snapshot's posed artifice and sentimental associations. Instead, Eggleston relies on straightforward documentation to effect a cool, often uncanny, distance between viewer and subject.
Eggleston was among the first photographers to work regularly with new color technologies of the late 1960s and early 1970s. In 1967 he presented his work using color negative film to John Szarkowski, then director of the department of photographs at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Nine years later Szarkowski organized Eggleston's first solo exhibition at that museum, 75 dye transfer prints.
In 1977 Caldecot Chubb, a close friend and supporter, published Eggleston's monograph Election Eve, which included work based on Alexander Gardner's Sketchbook of the Civil War. In 1978 Eggleston was invited to conduct research in color video at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His awards include fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation (1974) and the National Endowment for the Arts (1975, 1978). He has photographed in Kenya (1980), Berlin, Salzburg, and Graz for his series Kiss Me Kracow (1983), Egypt (1986), England for the series English Rose (1988), the Transvaal (1989), and Spain (1990). He has also received commissions to shoot on location for John Huston's film Annie (1982), David Byrne's True Stories (1986), and throughout Elvis Presley's mansion, Graceland (1983). A major monograph, The Democratic Forest, was released in 1989, with an introduction by Eudora Welty. Eggleston also collaborated with writer Willie Morris on Faulkner's Mississippi, a book of photographs and accompanying text (1990). Eggleston lives in Memphis. A.W.
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measurements: Image: 28 x 43.2 cm (11 x 17 in.); Paper: 45.5 x 58.2 cm (17 15/16 x 22 15/16 in.); Matted: 50.8 x 61 cm (20 x 24 in.)
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inscription: Written in black ink on verso: "Wm Eggleston [signed]"
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CURRENT EXHIBITIONS
title: Contemporary American Photographers
opening date: 1992-11-18T05:00:00
Contemporary American Photographers. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (organizer) (November 18, 1992-January 3, 1993).
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LEGACY EXHIBITIONS
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PROVENANCE
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RELATED WORKS
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CITATIONS
E. H. T. "The Year in Review: Selections 1989." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 77, no. 2 (1990): 38-78.
page number: p. 70, no. 81
url: www.jstor.org/stable/25160106
Hinson, Tom E. "Contemporary American Photographs: An Exhibition." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 79, no. 9 (1992): 306-51.
page number: p. 347, no. 13, repr. p. 322
url: www.jstor.org/stable/25161375
Cleveland Museum of Art, Tom E Hinson. Catalogue of Photography. Cleveland, OH: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1996.
page number: Reproduced: P. 145
url:
Cleveland Museum of Art. The CMA Companion: A Guide to the Cleveland Museum of Art. Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 2014.
page number: Mentioned and reproduced: P. 313
url:
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IMAGES