Thanks to APhotoEditor for the heads up on a free online version of the William Eggleston documentary “William Eggleston in the Real World.” I watched this documentary earlier this year on Netflix’s Watch Now service and would highly recommend it to anyone who considers him or herself a student of fine art photography.
William Eggleston has had a huge influence for me personally. He is also, perhaps more than any other photographer, responsible for the acceptance of a Democratized photography aesthetic in the fine art world today — a world where anything and everything around you can take on meaning, and an acceptance of the snapshot as fine art. It’s interesting in the documentary hearing about how Eggleston used to go to the drug store to watch the printing machine print out other people’s snapshots in order to better understand that form and format.
Eggleston was also a pioneer of color photography, who along with others like Stephen Shore, really paved the way for color photography as a viable form of fine art photography. Eggleston was the first photographer to ever have a color photography solo show at NY’s MOMA museum back in 1976.
You can find William Eggleston’s main presence on the internet today at his website here. I’d also highly recommend the most recent book on Eggleston’s photography, William Eggleston: Democratic Camera, Photographs and Video, 1961-2008
Anyways, enjoy the documentary. There are some great scenes in this one, including one where he is told that he can’t film in a supermarket. There’s lots of one on one coverage of Eggleston out, camera to his face, shooting as he does in his own way of presenting the world.