William Eggleston is regularly attributed to snapshot photos of everyday mundane objects like tricycles, lightbulbs, cars, parking lots, and signage; but he has also created a decent amount of portrait photos throughout his career. I want to examine what makes those photos stand out from his other work if they do at all, why they often get less coverage, and how much significance they hold in the grand scheme of the unbelievably sizeable body of work he has amassed throughout his life. This is insight for inspiration: Eggleston’s Portraits.

Eggleston’s portraits were made in both color and black and white and contained subjects that ranged from strangers to family, friends, and acquaintances. He started creating portrait photos in the early 1960s at the same time that he began to take photography seriously. During a five-year period in the 60s, black and white portraiture was the primary focus of Eggleston’s photography. This work was first exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery in the UK in 2016 and featured 100 photos taken throughout the course of Eggleston’s career. At first, a lot of this work was created at night using high speed films to avoid drawing attention to himself from his subjects. According to photography historian Phillip Prodger, “he obtained a special high-speed police surveillance film and, since it was not available in the right size, cut it by hand, including sprocket holes, in order to load it into a 110mm Minox spy camera. This accounts for the pronounced, otherworldly grain in pictures such as Untitled, 1966.”

Eggleston did his best to not let on to his subjects that they were being photographed during this period which explains the candid images that have a distant quality to them. Several writers who study Eggleston’s work compare these photos to the paintings of Edward Hopper. Sofia Coppola once said, “so many people take those simple snapshots of life, but there’s something about Eggleston that no-one can match. So many of his images I’ve seen over the years stay with me, like a pastel memory from another time.” These black and white portraits matter because they establish Eggleston’s baseline sensibility: an eye for the quiet dignity of ordinary people, often anonymous, who sit uneasily between documentary capture and psychological distance. Much later in life Eggleston said, “I’m just not interested in, nor consider myself, a portrait photographer one bit. Sometimes people just appeared.”

This disinterest explains why his portraits get less coverage, overshadowed by his pioneering use of color and the snapshot aesthetic.

One aspect of Eggleston’s photography most often attributed to him was his revolutionary use of color. His use of the dye transfer process to color his images in print is what gives them their signature oversaturated look, and Eggleston applied this same process to his portraiture.

Prodger describes this stating, “the corded red cardigan worn by William Eggleston III shimmers like a beacon; the sky above, a contrasting plane of midnight blue. The yellow dress worn by a short-haired woman carrying a handbag becomes a screen behind which the figure stands. A different yellow, ornamented with white flowers, enrobes the artist’s wife Rosa like an International Gothic painting. A woman seated in a diner and smoke a cigarette, seen from the back, seems sandwiched between the enveloping red of the brick wall in front of her and the long, green banquette on which she sits.”

When Eggleston moved onto color there was a period that his fascination with portraits died off in exchange for the types of images he is typically known for. Still, he did create some color portraits. The portrait he considered his first successful color image was, in his words,“some kind of pimply, freckle-faced guy in the late sunlight. And by god, it all worked.”

While his move away from portraiture may have stemmed from his infatuation with color itself, he returned to photographing people in the 1970s. In 1973, his “Nightclub Portraits” emerged alongside his video project Stranded in Canton. Prodger notes that Eggleston adapted video cameras for low light, replacing lenses with those meant for 16mm film and even modifying one with an infrared tube. These portraits were made in bars and nightclubs in Mississippi, Memphis, and New Orleans, cut with scenes from his home life. He also created large-format portraits using mobile studio lighting. These images became the backbone of his lectures while teaching at Harvard in the 70s.

Eggleston also photographed celebrities, though sparingly. His sitters included Dennis Hopper, Joe Strummer, and David Lynch. He photographed film sets such as John Huston’s Annie, David Byrne’s True Stories, and Kasi Lemmons’ Eve’s Bayou. These images, despite featuring famous figures, carry the same snapshot sensibility, bringing larger-than-life people back to a more human level. Critics note that his portraits challenge our expectations of the genre.

“Photographic portraiture gravitates towards likeness… Yet who is to say that at that moment, in that place, from that distance, at that angle, a photograph tells us anything at all about what drives a person, what shapes them, how they think? Or whether such things even matter. Eggleston is the antidote to such over-reaching conceits.”

Overall, what brings Eggleston’s portraits to life is the same element that defines his work overall: sequencing. Individual portraits rarely hold the same weight as his broader bodies of work, but together they create a rhythm of thought and feeling. As Prodger explains, “while individual portraits may draw us in, it is not in their individuality that we find their full force, but in the connecting and reconnecting of thought and feeling that they collectively represent.”

His portraiture stands at odds with what he is most known for, while still fitting into his broader canon. They may not carry the weight of William Eggleston’s Guide or The Democratic Forest, but they show the importance of exploring what a photographer creates on the margins of their better-known work.