William Eggleston has made an indelible contribution to photography as we know it. His mastery of light and color, his astute perception of American life and its commonplaces, and his consummate technical execution have created decades of visual poetry, potent and unmatched.
John Updike famously said that his only duty was “to give the mundane its beautiful due.” When I read Updike’s “A&P,” I think of Eggleston’s “Untitled from the Los Alamo Portfolio, 1965–74,” in which a young, coiffed supermarket boy, redolent of “A&P” ’s narrator, corrals a train of shopping carts, his profile suspended in the blaze of the hot evening sun. Peter Schjeldahl, writing for this magazine in 2008, said of that photograph, “The subject is dreary fact. The content is erotic truth that Plato would have endorsed.”
This Sunday, Eggleston celebrates his seventy-fifth birthday. In tribute, rather than showing a selection of his work, we decided to share some photographs of Eggleston himself. His son, Winston Eggleston, told me that his father plans to spend part of his birthday “playing Bach sonatas on his recently installed Bösendorfer piano, looking out on Overton Park, in Memphis.” As for the rest, Schjeldahl called Eggleston a “hard-living dandy,” and anyone who has followed his storied life will suspect that he is rarely far from a glass of bourbon and a good time. We hope he’ll enjoy a combination of the above this weekend—in which case, happy birthday, Mr. Eggleston, and cheers.
