I had the attitude that I would work with this present-day material and do the best I could to describe it with photography, not intending to make any particular comment about whether it was good or bad or whether I liked it or not. It was just there, and I was interested in it. That's what I still do today.

William Eggleston

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 answers people

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 artist struggle

I am at war with the obvious.

William Eggleston

photography photographer war

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

William Eggleston

important photographer way

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

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

cameras looks thinking

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

follow-up photograph impossible

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

There is no particular reason to search for meaning.

William Eggleston

search-for-meaning photographer reason

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

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

William Eggleston

happened grew reason

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

William Eggleston

photographer

Photography just gets us out of the house.

William Eggleston

photography photographer house

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

play mean ideas

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

appreciate photographer people

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

black-and-white photography art

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

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

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

down-and quality interesting

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

magazines art firsts