The Red Ceiling

Last updated
The Red Ceiling
The Red Ceiling by William Eggleston.jpg
Artist William Eggleston
Year1973
TypePhotograph
MediumDye transfer print
Dimensions35.2 cm× 55.1 cm(13.9 in× 21.7 in)
Location Getty Center; Museum of Modern Art

The Red Ceiling is a photograph by William Eggleston. Its formal title is Greenwood, Mississippi. Eggleston took the photo at the home of his friend Dr. Thomas Chester Boring, Jr., at 508 Macarthur St. in Greenwood, Mississippi.

Contents

Process

The photograph is a dye transfer print measuring 13+78 by 21+1116 inches (35.2 by 55.1 cm). Eggleston considers it among his most challenging and powerful works, "so powerful that, in fact, I've never seen it reproduced on the page to my satisfaction". [1]

Reception and legacy

A copy of the photograph is held by the J. Paul Getty Museum, but is currently not on view at the Getty Center. [1] Another copy is held by the Museum of Modern Art. [2]

It has been described as Eggleston's "most famous photograph," with "some indefinable sense of menace". [3] It is widely recognised as the album cover for the record Radio City (1974) by the Memphis band Big Star.

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Edward Steichen</span> American photographer, artist, and curator

Edward Jean Steichen was a Luxembourgish American photographer, painter, and curator, renowned as one of the most prolific and influential figures in the history of photography.

William Eggleston is an American photographer. He is widely credited with increasing recognition for color photography as a legitimate artistic medium. Eggleston's books include William Eggleston's Guide (1976) and The Democratic Forest (1989).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gustave Le Gray</span>

Jean-Baptiste Gustave Le Gray was a French painter, draughtsman, sculptor, print-maker, and photographer. He has been called "the most important French photographer of the nineteenth century" because of his technical innovations, his instruction of other noted photographers, and "the extraordinary imagination he brought to picture making." He was an important contributor to the development of the wax paper negative.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Edward Ruscha</span> American painter

Edward Joseph Ruscha IV is an American artist associated with the pop art movement. He has worked in the media of painting, printmaking, drawing, photography, and film. He is also noted for creating several artist's books. Ruscha lives and works in Culver City, California.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">J. Paul Getty Museum</span> Art museum in Los Angeles, California

The J. Paul Getty Museum, commonly referred to as the Getty, is an art museum in Los Angeles, California housed on two campuses: the Getty Center and Getty Villa.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">J. Paul Getty Trust</span> American art institution in Los Angeles

The J. Paul Getty Trust is the world's wealthiest art institution, with an estimated endowment of US$7.7 billion in 2020. Based in Los Angeles, California, it operates the J. Paul Getty Museum, which has two locations—the Getty Center in the Brentwood neighborhood of Los Angeles and the Getty Villa in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles. Its other programs are the Getty Foundation, the Getty Research Institute, and the Getty Conservation Institute.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Anna Atkins</span> British photographer (1799–1871)

Anna Atkins was an English botanist and photographer. She is often considered the first person to publish a book illustrated with photographic images. Some sources say that she was the first woman to create a photograph.

Joel Sternfeld is an American fine-art photographer. He is best known for his large-format color pictures of contemporary American life and identity. His work contributed to the establishment of color photography as a respected artistic medium. Furthering the tradition of roadside photography started by Walker Evans in the 1930s, Sternfeld documents people and places with unexpected excitement, despair, tenderness, and hope. Ever since the 1987 publication of his landmark “American Prospects,” Sternfeld’s work has interwoven the conceptual and political, while being steeped in history, landscape theory and his passion for the passage of the seasons. Sternfeld’s is a beautiful and sad portrait of America - ironic, lyrical, unfinished, seeing without judging.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alec Soth</span> American photographer

Alec Soth is an American photographer, based in Minneapolis. Soth makes "large-scale American projects" featuring the midwestern United States. New York Times art critic Hilarie M. Sheets wrote that he has made a "photographic career out of finding chemistry with strangers" and photographs "loners and dreamers". His work tends to focus on the "off-beat, hauntingly banal images of modern America" according to The Guardian art critic Hannah Booth. He is a member of Magnum Photos.

Judy Fiskin is an American artist working in photography and video, and a member of the art school faculty at California Institute of the Arts. Her videos have been screened in the Documentary Fortnight series at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, and at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles; her photographs have been shown at MOCA, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, at The New Museum in New York City, and at the Pompidou Center in Paris.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Getty Research Institute</span> Organization with archives and databases for art history and provenance research

The Getty Research Institute (GRI), located at the Getty Center in Los Angeles, California, is "dedicated to furthering knowledge and advancing understanding of the visual arts".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mitch Epstein</span> American photographer

Mitchell Epstein is an American photographer. His books include Vietnam: A Book of Changes (1997); Family Business (2003), which won the 2004 Kraszna-Krausz Photography Book Award; Recreation: American Photographs 1973–1988 (2005); Mitch Epstein: Work (2006); American Power (2009); Berlin (2011); New York Arbor (2013); Rocks and Clouds (2018); Sunshine Hotel (2019); In India (2021); and Property Rights (2021).

Robert Hugh Cumming was an American painter, sculptor, photographer, and printmaker best known for his photographs of conceptual drawings and constructions, which layer meanings within meanings, and reference both science and art history.

Miyako Ishiuchi, is a Japanese photographer.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">William Carter (photographer)</span>

William Carter was born in Los Angeles in 1934 and graduated from Stanford University in 1957. Moving to Berkeley, California, he became a professional photographer, writer and editor. Living in New York from 1961–63, Carter worked as an editor for publisher Harper & Row. Based in Beirut, Lebanon 1964-66, he published photographs and articles on subjects such as the Kurds of Iraq in Life, the Sunday Times, Geographical Magazine and others. In 1966-69 he freelanced from London doing assignments for The New York Times, Women’s Wear Daily, and TWA’s Annual Report.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Getty Center</span> Campus of the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, US

The Getty Center, in Los Angeles, California, is a campus of the Getty Museum and other programs of the Getty Trust. The $1.3 billion center opened to the public on December 16, 1997, and is well known for its architecture, gardens, and views overlooking Los Angeles. The center sits atop a hill connected to a visitors' parking garage at the bottom of the hill by a three-car, cable-pulled hovertrain people mover.

<i>The Steerage</i> 1907 black and white photograph by Alfred Stieglitz

The Steerage is a black and white photograph taken by Alfred Stieglitz in 1907. It has been hailed by some critics as one of the greatest photographs of all time because it captures in a single image both a formative document of its time and one of the first works of artistic modernism.

There were men and women and children on the lower deck of the steerage. There was a narrow stairway leading to the upper deck of the steerage, a small deck right on the bow with the steamer.

To the left was an inclining funnel and from the upper steerage deck there was fastened a gangway bridge that was glistening in its freshly painted state. It was rather long, white, and during the trip remained untouched by anyone.

On the upper deck, looking over the railing, there was a young man with a straw hat. The shape of the hat was round. He was watching the men and women and children on the lower steerage deck...A round straw hat, the funnel leaning left, the stairway leaning right, the white drawbridge with its railing made of circular chains – white suspenders crossing on the back of a man in the steerage below, round shapes of iron machinery, a mast cutting into the sky, making a triangular shape...I saw shapes related to each other. I was inspired by a picture of shapes and underlying that the feeling I had about life."

John Divola is an American contemporary visual artist and educator, living in Riverside, California. He works in photography, describing himself as exploring the landscape by looking for the edge between the abstract and the specific. He is a professor in the art department at University of California Riverside.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">William Greiner</span> American photographer and painter

William (Kross) Greiner in New Orleans, Louisiana is an American photographer and painter, now living in Fort Worth, TX.

David Martin Heath was an American documentary, humanist and street photographer.

References

  1. 1 2 J. Paul Getty Museum. Greenwood, Mississippi. Retrieved September 6, 2008.
  2. Museum of Modern Art. William Eggleston. (American, born 1939). Greenwood, Mississippi. 1973. Retrieved September 6, 2008
  3. O'Hagan, Sean. Out of the ordinary. The Observer, July 25, 2004. Retrieved September 6, 2008.

Bibliography

Jane Flowers The True Legacy of Dr Tom Boring, An Unsolved Murder Mystery Biography, published June 18, 2020