EGGLESTON WILLIAM (1939 ) Untitled (Confederate flag)

Sale 2158 - Lot 359

Price Realized: $ 13,200

?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price

Estimate: $ 10,000 - $ 15,000

EGGLESTON, WILLIAM (1939- )
"Untitled" (Confederate flag). Dye-transfer print, 12 3/4x17 3/4 inches (32.4x45.1 cm.), with Eggleston's signature, in ink, on recto and verso and his Artistic Trust hand stamp with the title, dates and edition notations 5/15, in pencil, in an unidentified hand, on verso. 1973; printed 1996

Set Alert for Similar Items

Additional Details

Originally from the collection of the photographer; by agent to A Private West Coast Collection.

William Eggleston once said that the crossing bars on the Confederate flag provided him with his primary formal device. Here that vision is literally made manifest in this strangely intimate image of a rusted Confederate plate; it is an image of the past, and of deterioration, presented in the vivid, saturated color that Eggleston is known for. Indeed the picture is as much a meditation on the range of contrasting colors and textures as it is a metaphor for the South. The print serves as a strong example of how Eggleston raised his deceptively mundane subject matter to the status of icon.

Eggleston discovered photography in the late 1960s, studying photobooks made by Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Frank, and Walker Evans. By late in the decade he was experimenting with color film. After showing his work to John Szarkowski, the influential and legendary curator at the Museum of Modern Art, he was given his first, and the first, solo exhibition of color work (1976). This exhibit, and the monograph that accompanied it with its cover image of a tricycle, is considered now to be one of the watershed moments in the history of photography. Eggleston, along with photographers such as Stephen Shore and Joel Sternfeld, ushered in the era of fine art color photography.