The Hara Museum of Contemporary Art is pleased to announce the first solo exhibition of William Eggleston’s work at a Japanese museum. The exhibition focuses on two series of works commissioned by the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris and shown in their space in Paris for the very first time in 2001 and 2009. The exhibition also shows a group of the artist’s most famous historical works from the collection of the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography.
 
For three years, American photographer William Eggleston has photographed the city of Paris as part of a commission for the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain. Taken throughout different seasons, these new images by one of the fathers of color photography portray the local and the cosmopolitan, the glamorous and the gritty, the everyday and the extraordinary. This exhibition also provides an exceptional occasion to bring together William Eggleston’s distinctive pictures and his recent paintings, an unknown aspect of his work that has never before been presented to the public.  
 
On a previous commission, also from Fondation Cartier, and in response to a “go-as-you please” project, Eggleston identified Kyoto as his favourite city, and one he already knew and loved. Always far from stereotypes and attentive to everyday details of urban life, his “democratic eye” once again brings his very personal and strong vision of the world deep into Japanese culture.  
 
After the exhibit at the Hara Museum, the series Paris will be presented in September 2010 at The Hasselblad Foundation in Göteborg, Sweden.  
 
About the Artist
Born in 1939 in Memphis, Tennessee, William Eggleston grew up in Sumner, Mississippi. While attending university in the South, he purchased his first camera and discovered the work of Henri Cartier- Bresson and Walker Evans. In the early 1960s, Eggleston moved to Memphis, where he continues to reside, and started experimenting with black and white photography. However, by the end of the decade he had started creating primarily color photographs. In 1976, John Szarkowski, Director of Photography at the MoMA, organized an exhibition of Eggleston’s work, one of the institution’s first solo shows of color photographs. This marked a turning point for the medium, which had been used almost exclusively for commercial aims. Since this historic exhibition, the internationally acclaimed photographer has been the subject of numerous exhibitions all over the world, as well as of various publications. A retrospective of his work was recently presented at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. In 1998, Eggleston won the Hasselblad Award, known as the Nobel Prize of photography. http://www.egglestontrust.com/