William Eggleston, Stuart Davis and others honored by CNN

Written by By Lola Adesioye, CNN

William Eggleston: U.S.

Stuart Davis: U.K.

John Wells: U.S.

Bertrand Bouzereau: France

Martin Scordino: U.S.

Susan Metz: U.S.

Zara Wade: U.K.

“I think I kind of know more about his side of it than his side,” Davis said in an interview with CNN Art Year. “When he was shooting people, it was about the personality, it was more about who he was rather than what he was wearing.”

Eggleston’s family arrived in the US in the 1960s and his father told him stories about every photograph his grandfather took of his small Arkansas family. The American-born London-based photographer is best known for focusing on working-class, forgotten people, particularly his fellow travelers in the American South.

In 2010, Eggleston was given the lifetime achievement award at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. In 2013, he was inducted into the National Museum of American Art’s inaugural “House And Home” collection.

William Eggleston is considered one of the most influential American photographers. Credit: © William Eggleston © ROD REYNOLDS/CORBIS

Bouzereau’s heavily influenced photographs include “the woman dragging the wheelbarrow carrying mattresses over rocks, holding a plastic bag containing concrete stones in front of her chest,” based on the theme of women being mistreated by their husbands in order to get more domestic labor.

He won the competition for his “Requiem of the Emergence,” which showed nude models’ voices emerging through the ruins of a gas- and cigarette-burning factory, where coal was burned before it could be used to create electricity.

“The people started reading in a different way,” he said, “the way it’s used for something else, more abstractly.”

In the same year, Davis took first prize for an image of a young woman sitting, with an oblique lens, at a table in front of a large marble work which doubles as a photograph. Her bottom appears to be dressed in the same color as the marble, setting up a metaphor of political aesthetics.

“As an artist, I just embrace it, I’m not overly interested in specific colors and feelings,” Davis said. “You have an image and you just make it yours. You don’t care what anybody else thinks of your work.”

For his entry, Jones wrote a passionate introduction for his grandfather’s photography — saying he “displayed a level of insight, competence and compassion that was unique, rivaled and not easily replicated.”

“But he had another name, too,” he added. “He was a nugget of clay, moulded in a clay of anxiety, love and hope for the American dream.”

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