In the spring of 1994 William Eggleston visited Los Angeles to shoot a portfolio of Hollywood. Journalist Kristine McKenna escorted him around town, and they had several in-depth conversations, some in his room at the Chateau Marmont. These are excerpts from those tape-machine recordings, which are compiled in the new book William Eggleston For Now. 

“I guess you could say my childhood was idyllic. My parents had a great respect for art, and two of the first things given to me as a child by my mother were books on Rouault and De Chirico. My parents always encouraged my interest in art, even though they thought a career as an artist was crazy. When I was growing up it was thought I’d be a concert pianist because I could play anything by ear, but a musician has to give his entire life to his work, and I have enough on my hands trying to get people to understand my photographs.” 

“When I was 15 I was sent to a private school that I hated, then I tried a few other schools before ending up at the University of Mississippi in Oxford. I was there for five years studying painting, and the painter I liked the most during that period was Franz Kline. I also liked De Kooning and Pollock. Abstract expressionism was the dominant thing when I was coming of age as an artist, and I went to New York and looked at a lot of that stuff. I was painting abstractions myself at the time, and although most people don’t know this, I’ve never stopped painting. I never got a degree because I couldn’t see any sense in taking tests. I didn’t mind going to classes, but taking a test? For whom? And what would I do with a damn degree anyway? Because I refused to take tests I had to talk the dean into letting me back into school every year, and that was hard because they didn’t think I was particularly talented. At the time I was doing the groundwork for photography, and photography was barely even taught then, much less considered an art form.” 

“When I was ten years old I was given a Brownie camera and I took some pictures of my dog, but they weren’t very good. That left me completely disenchanted with the idea of taking pictures, and I continued to hate it until the late 50s, when a friend in boarding school made me buy a camera. I began to get it. Then I saw a copy of Cartier-Bresson’s book The Decisive Moment, and I really got excited about taking pictures.” 

"I don’t see many movies, but there were a few films where the color was used brilliantly, and they made a big impression on me—Alfred Hitchcock’s North By Northwest and [Arthur Penn’s] Bonnie and Clyde are the two I’m thinking of in particular. Something clicked in me when I saw those films—maybe it was just one minute out of the whole movie. During the same period that I was thinking about those films, I had a friend who had a job working nights at a photography lab where they processed snapshots, and I’d go visit him because we were both night owls. I started looking at these pictures coming out—they’d come out in a long ribbon—and although most of them were accidents, some were absolutely beautiful, so I started spending all night looking at these ribbons of pictures. I was particularly struck by a picture of a guy who worked for a grocery store, pushing a shopping cart out in the late-afternoon sun. I figured if amateurs working with cheap cameras could do this, I could use good cameras and really come up with something. I had a natural talent for organizing colors—not putting all the reds in one corner, for instance. Essentially what I was doing was applying intelligent painting theory to color photography.” 

“People just hit the roof when my pictures where shown at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1976. That surprised me, too, because the work was in such a hallowed institution. Everybody screamed, “This isn’t art! Why is this in a museum?” I’d intentionally constructed the pictures to make them look like ordinary snapshots anyone could’ve taken, and a lot of that had to do with the subject matter—a shopping center parking lot, for instance. Because the pictures looked so simple a lot of people didn’t notice that the color and form were worked out, that the content came and went where it ought to—that they were more than casual pictures. People say I “shoot from the hip,” but that’s not really how I work. When I look at something it registers on my mind so clearly that I can be loose when I shoot the picture. I always take just one picture of something, and I’ve never staged a photograph in my life, and never needed to because there are pictures everywhere. If I’m ever in a place I think is impossible to photograph, I remember something Garry Winogrand told me. He said, ‘Bill, you can take a good picture of anything,’ and that’s always stuck with me.”

“My work has been described as documenting a vanishing South, but that was never something I was conscious of. When I was taking the pictures those critics are probably referring to, as far as I knew those things were there for good. I didn’t know that five years later this incredible Coke sign would be replaced by a 7-Eleven. That possibility never dawned on me, because up until the 60s the South looked pretty much as it had during the Depression. But from the 60s on it became a different ball game, and it’s unrecognizable today from what it was. Have you been to the South lately? It’s not ‘interesting’ bad like LA—it just looks like a bunch of idiots put the place together.” 

“I’ve never understood why people describe my work as romantic, because I don’t romanticize the world. If you could turn back time and look at a place as it was when I photographed it, I think the picture and the place would look pretty much the same. I’ve never felt the need to enhance the world in my pictures, because the world is spectacular enough as it is.”