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William Eggleston, Untitled, c. 1975, Dye transfer print, 16 x 20", Cheim & Read, New York, © Eggleston Artistic Trust. |
William Eggleston, Prophet of Contemporary Color Photography |
Whitney Museum of American Art By THOMAS WESKI I can't fly, but I can make experiments. "I would pass a quite fine piano in that house every time I came from the back to the front. It was in this big hall. And every time I went past it, I would play a few things, notes, sometimes without any success at all. And then I got a little better and better. Time went on. (…) At a very early age I could play the piano. Anything, practically. After hearing it once. Not reading music, then. (…) And maybe never play the same one twice. Very much like the way I optically work today." Because his father went into the Navy shortly after his birth in 1939, and his mother regularly stayed at his military post, William Eggleston didn't grow up on the family's cotton farm, but rather with his grandparents in the small city of Sumner, Mississippi. His grandfather was a judge in the local court, the building for which constituted the center of town. The town is surrounded by huge cotton plantations, which were the source of income and prosperity for the owners' families over the generations. Just on the other side of the center stands the grandparents' house where Eggleston spent his childhood, on one of the swampy bayous that are characteristic of the area. The youngster played music, drew, and was introduced to photography, which his grandfather practiced as a hobby. Even though the grandfather had his own darkroom and furnished his grandson with a simple camera, Eggleston quickly lost interest. After his grandfather died and his father, who was back from the war and managing a cotton plantation that had been left to him (this is one of the family plantations, which he got to run. Be he didn't inherit it), suffered a stroke, the young man transferred to a boarding school and subsequently attended college. There he made friends with Tom Buchanan, who was the same age, and with whom he shared a predilection for classical music. When they went to university together, Buchanan visited a camera shop with Eggleston, and convinced him to buy a 35 mm viewfinder camera for himself. Eggleston's interest in photography reawakened, and he took some courses and was now developing his own prints. During his time in college, the 17-year-old met Rosa Dosset; she was four years younger and came from a prosperous family, and he later married her. Even as a teenager, Eggleston was a rare phenomenon. In addition to music and photography, he was intensely involved in film and audio. The young man was also developing his own outward style. He usually wore a suit, in marked contrast to the fashion of the time, which was becoming more informal. Even later, when the civil rights, student, and hippie movements were doing away with inherited societal relationships, Eggleston's appearance didn't change. This dress was the norm for him, which he had maintained since his time in boarding school. The fact that his serious appearance often contradicted his unconventional behavior is one of many paradoxes that distinguish him up to today. His origin, the social position of his family, and his financial circumstances gave him early freedom and independence in every form; so during his lifetime he was not forced to have a paying job, and he didn't have to comply with any societal rules. The result was a person who from an early age was free-thinking and free-acting in every way, and could follow his inclination confidently and unwaveringly. At that time there were some major technical and social changes in Eggleston's home region. The introduction of machines for harvesting cotton brought an end to the traditional labor-intensive field work. This development led to the laying off of many agricultural workers, generally blacks, who often had been employed for generations by the powerful families of the plantation owners. At the same time, there arose, first in the large American cities in the North and later also in the south, a popular movement whose eventual goal was racial equality. Sumner became the center of public interest when, in 1955, a trial was conducted for the white perpetrators in the lynching death of a 14-year-old black. Eggleston lived in the middle of this social upheaval, but today it appears that he simply took it all in with his characteristic stoicism. At this time Eggleston's photographical reference point was the publication The Decisive Moment by Henri Cartier-Bresson, which was unusual from the standpoint of content and layout, and which Eggleston discovered in 1959. The large-format monograph, which appeared in 1952, shows over 120 prints from among the masterpieces of the photographer, who had a successful retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1947. Eggleston was impressed by the quality of the prints in the gravure process, and he took a serious look at the photography of Henri Cartier-Bresson. Eggleston was particularly interested in the formal conception of the French photographer's prints, which often show the subject not from the front, but from an oblique angle, and thus achieve an impression of depth. But Eggleston also internalized the concept behind the French Photographer's title, The Decisive Moment. With his understanding, Cartier-Bresson left his mark on several generations of photographers. Like their idol, they sought to reduce the happenings in front of the camera to an essential moment that constituted a representative high point in the picture. The manner in which photography reacts intuitively to reality originated in photojournalism; at that time it also formed a European counterpoint to the prevailing canon of art photography for reasons other than its spontaneity. The understanding that at the instant the photo is taken, the uncontrollable enriches the resulting picture contrasted with the concepts of the current leading American protagonists, the photographers Ansel Adams and Edward Weston. Their photographs were distinguished by rigorous composition, masterful use of photographic technique, and the treatment of classical themes. Ansel Adams had worked out a technical process with exposing and the composition of the photographic materials that made it possible to reproduce the print in a finely tuned gray scale between pure white and deep black. In order to use this process, the photographers had to "pre-visualize" their subject, that is, they had to know what effects the contrast in the object would have in the development of the print, and expose the subject matter accordingly. They worked very slowly and meticulously. Their plate cameras, which could be used only on a tripod, produced large-format negatives for the darkroom work. But the majestic landscapes of the American West and the idealized portraits and abstract nudes didn't interest Eggleston. His first pictures show subjects in Sumner in raw, sketchy-appearing black and white photos. As with many of his early photographs, the observer has the feeling that he arranged the photo only roughly and accepted everything that fell within the established framework. This approach led to prints that integrated the incalculable into the picture and thus accepted the stroke of chance. Everything in front of the camera was basically worthy of a picture, even if it appeared trivial or banal. This approach to the routine contrasted with the lofty subjects of the master photographers of the time. One exception was the young Swiss photographer Robert Frank, who traveled in the US in the mid-50s with the help of a Guggenheim grant. In his application for the grant, he formulated some possible subjects: "A small catalog appears to the mind's eye: a city at night, a large parking lot, a supermarket, a highway, a man who has three cars, and one who has none." The culturally oriented America initially reacted with disapproval when the series first was published in France in 1958, and then in the US in 1959 under the title The Americans, with a foreword by Jack Kerouac. Frank didn't stick to the usual rules, so his pictorial language created a sensation because of its radical subjectivity and its content. The black-and-white photographs taken using only available light appeared coarse, brusque, and often like snapshots. Formally they also stood in contrast to the mass-media pictures, and created an expressive but critical and unadorned view of American society at the time of the Korean War. In 1962 Eggleston visited Frank's exhibition in the New York Museum of Modern Art, later he found, through the book, an access to the work of the European photographer. At this time Eggleston transferred to the University of Mississippi in Oxford and took some art courses. There he met Tom Young, a New Yorker who was teaching there as a visiting artist and introduced him to American abstract-expressionist painting. Eggleston ended his studies without a degree and moved to Memphis with Rosa Dosset, whom he married in 1962 and with whom he had three children, William III, Andra, and Winston. In this phase he had a feeling that he could take meaningful photographs only in Paris. The young couple traveled to the French capital, but Eggleston didn't take a single photograph there. Heading back to Memphis, he expressed his reason for not having taken any photographs. He complained to his friend Tom Young, "I don't particularly like what's around me." When Tom countered that it still could be a good basis for taking pictures, Eggleston said, "You know, that's not a bad idea." Eggleston realized that he could not find Cartier-Bresson's international subject world in his immediate surroundings and had to find his own themes. "I had to face the fact that what I had to do was go out into foreign landscapes. What was new back then were shopping centers, and I took pictures of them." These commercial surroundings gave rise to black-and-white photos using available light. Eggleston used high-speed film in his 35 mm camera and produced atmospheric prints that showed consumers in supermarkets and shopping malls, and their surroundings. These are mood pictures from a time when stores for daily needs were moving outside the city centers to the urban edges to distribute a seemingly unlimited array of wares in department stores build on land that was cheap to acquire. This excess of goods would later cause critics to speak of pseudo decisions, of consumer terror in choosing every purchase. Alienation, loneliness, and longing were contemporary phenomena that accompanied this development and made their way as themes into Eggleston's work, along with the relationship of the individual to the the crowd. The photographer thus connected to an American tradition of artistic involvement with the symptoms of a modern faceless society that got its relevance from the significance of the everyday, the apparently trivial or banal. The American painter Edward Hopper had already treated the mentioned psychic mindsets in his paintings in an exemplary way, by placing them in direct relationship with archetypal American landscapes and city scapes, and thus developing a causal relationship between the modern environment and human behavior. Some of Eggleston's black-and-white photographs from this time were also distinguished not only by their content, but also through a special formal quality. They were effective because they connected the content, which at first glance appeared familiar, to a very individual view. It is the difference between the individual perception by the photographer and the communally formed perception of the observer, which makes the mundane subjects in his prints appear different, new, or unusual. When this phenomen of shifted perspective is a characteristic of not just individual photographs, but rather permeates a photographer's entire work, one can speak of a connection between photography and certain stylistic devices of an author, because it constitutes an individual, recognizable personal touch. His photos can settle into the subconscious to the point that the real objects are perceived only as motifs defined by the artist. At this time in Eggleston's carreer, some photographs retained this particular quality of author photography. In the same year, 1962, Eggleston also met the American artist William Christenberry, who had moved to Memphis to teach at Memphis State University. In his drawings, paintings, and sculptures, Christenberry generally used motifs from the rural culture and politics of the southern states. At that time Christenberry also organized dadaistic happenings, in which Rosa and william Eggleston took part as protagonists. Eggleston casued a sensation not only because of his preference for European luxury cars – over the years he owned cars from Ferrari, Jaguar, Bentley, and Rolls Royce – in the rural Mississippi Delta. As a rebel with the appearance of a silent film star given over to alcohol, drugs, and beautiful women, Eggleston was described by eyewitnesses as a character who could have sprung forth from the literary world of Tennessee Williams. But one contemporary companion also adds a dark side to the picture of the dandy: "Bill was always wearing a real severe suit. It was like he was the fucking count. Voluptuous and corrupt. It was unreal; what an image." To provide models for his works, in 1958 Christenberry started photographing his subjects in color with with a simple Brownie camera. Eggleston discovered the small color prints in the atelier of his friend, who wanted them to be considered merely as "bleak references for my paintings." At the time, using color photography in an artistic context was uncommon. Photographers with a claim to artistic standards didn't work in color, but bowed to the reigning dogma of black-and-white prints that they developed themselves. Color photography was generally reserved for colleagues in advertising and journalism, whose clients had enough money to pay for the developing. The American photographer Walker Evans had been known in photography circles since the 1938 publication of his American Photographs. In 1959 he issued a widely quoted, frequently shortened and repeated pronouncement: "There are four simple words for the matter, which must be whispered: Color photography is vulgar." But then he continued with a sentence that read like an owner's manual for connecting the photographic subject world already discovered by Eggleston to color photography: "When the point of a picture subject is precisely its vulgarity or its color-accident through man's hand, not God's, then only color film can be used validly." Eggleston began photographing in color in the mid-60s. After a few unsuccessful attempts with lighting, he eventually mastered the technical difficulties and quickly achieved satisfactory results. "And by God, it worked. Just overnight. The first frame, I remember, was a guy pushing grocery carts. Some kind of pimply, freckle-faced guy in the late sunlight. Pretty fine picture, actually." As in his black-and-white photographs, Eggleston investigated the ordinary and the unusual quallities that it concealed. Color not only contributed to a better description of the subject, but also changed the emotional perception in the pictures. The warm light gave the portrait of the supermarket employee a conciliatory note at the same time that it cast a sobering glance on the American Dream. Since Eggleston did not develop his color pictures himself, for his work prints he used a large photo lab available through drugstores. When he picked up his photos from developing, he began to take an interest in the photographic world of other customers. Photography was becoming quite popular, for technical advances had made it possible to produce economical prints on a large scale and in a short time. Eggleston came at night and took a closer look at the vast number os pictures spilling forth from the machines. He studied the unconscious compositions in these snapshots and adopted their layout for his artistic work. "It was one of the most exciting and unforgettable experiences as a whole — and educational for me." At that time, Eggleston was not alone in his interest in snapshot photography. It was perceived as an invigorating antidote to the reigning art photography, which seemed unworldly and rigid in its rules. Its qualities were explained in a publication on this topic: " … The result is that his [the snapshooter's] pictures have an apparent disorder and imperfection, which is exactly their appeal and their style. The picture isn't straight. It isn't done well. It isn't composed. It isn't thought out. And out of this imbalance, and out of this not knowing, and out of this real innocence toward the medium comes an enormous vitality and expression of life." Eggleston recognized that this type of photography facilitated a narrative style that connected him with his audience, because it appeared accessible, understandable, and authentic. At the same time there was a chance to consciously integrate the formal language of the unsuccessful snapshot into his photographic work and thus tread new artistic ground. The American photographer Lewis Baltz saw in this the basis for the special quality of Eggleston's pictures: "It is this awkwardly disengaged quality of the failed snapshot that Eggleston uses to supply his photographs with their tenseness and their ineluctable alienness … And this device supports the central irony in Eggleston's photographs: images of the American home place, inviting on their surface and ice cold at their heart, like images from another planet." A young generation of American photographers began to take interest in qualities inherent to media, and in the creator's individual perspective in combination with the analysis of a subject world using the immediate surroundings as a theme. They found models for this content in the works of Walker Evans. In a later inverview, he referred to his type of photography as a "documentary style," to dissociate pictures composed in the formal language of documentary photograply from traditional documentary photographs, and thus accentuate his role as an author. Following this line of thought, Eggleston's photographs can be described as pictures in the snapshot style — that is, photographs whose author very consciously borrowed from an inartistic source for his artistic work, summoned up a type of picture, and filled it with new content. Other photographers, such as Garry Winogrand and Lee Friedlander, with whose works Eggleston was not familiar at the time, were also turning traditional standards upside down, by emphasizing their unconventionally formulated view of the world, similar to the subjectivized view developed by Robert Frank. Like private shutter-bugs, in their work they used mainly 35 mm cameras, with which they could react spontaneously to the photograph. The work of these creators was distinguished by the practice of photography that was personal but not private, which understood authenticity as a construct in photography, and was interested in continuing formal development. At a time in which Eggleston had now reached the point at which he wanted to make his pictures public. He traveled to New York, where he visited John Szarkowski, the director of the photography department at the Museum of Modern Art. He had succeeded Edward Steichen in 1962 at the department, which was founded in 1940, and a few years later he described his start as a curator as follows: "I think I took the risk of allowing photography to be itself In 1967 Szarkowski showed the photographs of Diane Arbus, Garry Winogrand, and Lee Friedlandeer in the exhibition New Documents. In the same year Eggleston visited the curator with a box filled with pictures: "I made an appointment. I had a lot of prints, mostly black-and-white, some [drugstore] color. I dropped my pictures off, and when I came back a couple of days later, he told me that he'd never seen anything like them before." Szarkowski recognized the quality of Eggleston's photography and planned for a future exhibition. "John encouraged me all the time to photograph in color. I would have done it anyway. But it helped." The curator established personal contact with Arbus, Friedlander, and Winogrand. Eggleston visited them at home, and they showed their pictures to one another. "Those few people I sought out — it's almost but not quite like saying they're heroes; it's more like seeking out your fellows, kindred spirits." The pictures by these photographs represented a departure into artistic photography as a contemporary critic noted: "Lee Friedlander and Garry Winogrand launched a whole genre of contemporary picture making, using the instant camera to catch not arty, 'significant' images but the whiff of everyday life — cars, animals, people and store windows, justaposed awkwardly against the harsh and sometimes shocking background of the city." After his return to Memphis, Eggleston switched to Kodachrome color slide film, because the negative material was not color stable, and the drugstore prints didn't come up to his expectations. When the Kodachrome photographs came back from developing, he projected the slides at home and showed them to his family and friends. Eggleston Photographers such as Lee Friedlander, Garry Winogrand, Tod Papageorge, and Stephen Shore (the latter of whom also worked in color) visited Eggleston in Memphis on their cross-country trips. At the end of the 60s and the start of the 70s, Eggleston also stayed often and for fairly long times in New York. He also met Joel Meyerowitz, who had been photographing street scenes there since the mid-60s using Kodachrome film. The result was a network of relationships among likeminded photographers, and public interest in their works grew to the extent that they were able to hold regular exhibitions. In Washington, Eggleston stayed in contact with the photographer John Gossage and his old friend William Christenberry. During one visit, Christenberry introduced Eggleston to Walter Hopps, who had been director at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington since 1970, and who later recalled, "By the time I went through the prints a second time, I believed them to be the finest work in color photography I'd seen." Hopps respected the interest that his curator colleague Szarkowski had for Eggleston, became friends with the photographer, accompanied him throughout his life, advised him, and publicized him, but without ever exhibiting him. Between 1968 and 1972 Eggleston continued working on his series of color slides of his home territory. After this series, Eggleston again used color darkroom chemicals, which had improved greatly in the meantime, and resumed the theme of his first color photographs. The prints, referred to as c-prints, now had a longer lifespan and could also be developed cheaply by machine. A series containing thousands of pictures resulted from several trips through the US between 1972 and 1974. The travelers included Walter Hopps and the movie actor Dennis Hopper, whom Hopps had known ever since his time as curator and director of the Pasadena Art Museum at the start of the 60s. In retrospect, Hopper characterized Eggleston as a "cool guy. Everybody who takes color photographs is influenced by him. Anyone who has taste, at least." On a joint trip, as they passed by the guarded entrance to the National Laboratory in Los Alamos, where the atom bomb was developed, Hopps later said that "Eggleston turned with a small smile and said, 'You know, I'd like to have a secret lab like that myself.'" A title for this series of photographs During this time Eggleston in fact had the most productive phase of his career, which was characterized by testing the limits of the medium and by a tremendous production of original artistic works. He concluded two large series of color photographs from which he prepared a group of slides in conjunction with John Szarkowski for his solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. With "Los Alamos," though, the plan was to publish the series as a multi-volume set with hundreds of original photographs. On various projects Eggleston simultaneously photographed with various types of cameras, from 35 mm to medium and large format. For various themes he likewise used black-and-white as well as color, and sometimes worked under difficult conditions for taking pictures. For example, for the 13 x 18 cm portraits he made inside bars, he had to focus his large plate camera in low light. In contrast to the photography projects that he carried out alone, with this undertaking he used assistants to help him with the photographs. Because of the closeness to the person photographed, with this type of camera the clearly defined area in the picture was extremely small. In order to produce sharp photographs, this required the cooperation of the model, who could not budge after the camera was focused. In the photographs the flash softly illuminates the night owls and shows them as individuals beyond cliches and poses. In the same subcultural scene Eggleston also used one of the portable video cameras that had just come onto the market. He filmed in documentary style and arranged night scenes with a camera that he had modified, using available light in the street, in bars and homes, at concerts, and, in journalistic fashion, private scenes with his family, his circle of friends, and his girlfriend at the time. He exposed the whole length of the video tape and filmed the action in question without editing. Many of the participants were intoxicated or under the influence of drugs. At that time LSD was still a legal drug, and amphetamines were coming into vogue. The subjects of these wild videos were close friends, musicians, chauvinists, and a transvestite, and even the photographer's children were filmed by their father in the early morning in a dreamy state between waking and sleeping. As with his early black-and-white photographs, Eggleston created a framework in which the event developed, and which he followed and reacted to with the camera. The technique was simultaneously confrontational and evasive: the camera kept zooming in to nearly touch the subject, and then pulling back to capture it in endlessly long views, and circling around it. Right after filming, Eggleston could show the video clips to the participants, and they found this new, unaccustomed near simultaneity of action and visible results very fascinating. The work was a unique experiment, but like the series of photographs from "Los Alamos" and the portraits from the bars, it found no final form at the time — one more incomplete fragment that remained invisible to the public. At the time, the common processes for color slides did not produce satisfactory prints. In the catalog of a color lab, Eggleston discovered the dye-transfer process, the most expensive print from a slide that the laboratory offered, because it could be produced only by hand. This involved a technique developed by Kodak in the 40s, in which the subject was transferred to a paper support in a succession of three color prints. The end result was a very color-stable print, with which, in contrast to conventional color prints, individual colors could be changed or intensified without influencing the complementary color. Until the advent of modern digital photo developing, which now permits this type of manipulation without major difficulty, this was the only procedure that photographers had for controlling the individual elements in the coloring of their works. This enabled them to arrive at an artistically based presentation using the depiction of visible phenomena through the medium of color photography, for the color was able to produce its pschyological effect. Eggleston had discovered the decisive technique for his artistic concept, and after seeing the first results, he immediately decided to use dye-transfer prints for his exhibitions. With the help of Walter Hopps, a first portfolio of dye-transfer prints bearing the title "14 Pictures" was published by the Washington gallerist Harry Lunn. With this, Eggleston found a form in which to sell his pictures in a limited edition. Walter Hopps and John Gossage helped select the subjects for this folder, for Eggleston couldn't make up his mind about certain pictures. "I don't have any favorites. Every picture is equal but different." Eggleston practiced this cooperative work method also with John Szarkowski in the final selection of items for his exhibition in the Museum of Modern Art, for which they searched among hundreds of slides for 75 subjects to be produced using the dye-transfer process. The exhibition "William Eggleston – Color Photographs" opened in the early summer of 1976. Eggleston's exhibition was the first presentation of works by a color photographer after a hiatus of ten years. It attracted additional attention, for Szarkowski had referred to as Eggleston as the "discoverer of color photography" in several interviews. The exhibition was also connected to the first publication of a color photographer by the museum. The curator had the idea of naming the publication "William Eggleston's Guide" after the Michelin Guide. In choosing the 48 portrayals from the catalog, he focused on subjects from the Mississippi Delta and ignored the shots from Tennessee and New Orleans. The book had the form and layout of a family photo album — a very appropriate framework for presenting photographs whose form recalled snapshots and concentrated on depicting close friends and familiar objects and landscapes. In the text of the catalog, the curator reported that former museum director Alfred H. Barr had remarked in a conversation with the photographer that "the design of most pictures seemed to radiate from a central, circular core." Eggleston responded that "this was true, since the pictures were based compositionally on the Confederate flag." Although the photographer was playing with the stereotype of the southerners in his typically ironic fashion, his statement was true in principle. The main subjects of the prints in the series were placed in the center of the pictures. Structurally the pictures recalled the snapshots that Eggleston had seen in his visits to labs. But in contrast to them, they were arranged over the entire surface. The tiniest detail was observed and could be charged with suggestive effect. Thus, objects and people often cut into the borders around the photos; they provided additional meaning and ambiguous tension, for they suggested a continuation of the action outside the picture. Often the photos were taken from unconventional perspectives. Eggleston photographed a tricycle, which Szarkowski selected as the title picture for the catalog, as he lay on the floor, and it suggested the unfettered view that a child has of an object, which in play can take on multiple meanings. The picture transports this openness of meaning and transposes observers back into a momentary feeling of their own childhood. A monochrome color photograph of a red ceiling became an icon for Eggleston's work; its effect was described by curator Mark Holborn: "In the photograph of the ceiling, for example, which skews your vision unusually upward in the room, as if you were seeing with the eye of a fly drawin to the swelling lightbulb, the field of red has an emotional weight — it is though the ceiling were bleeding. here, color reinforces the visual structure's reference to the Confederate flag — metaphorically a field of blood." In discussions of this subject, a poster visible at the lower right edge of the photos is often overlooked. Using pictograms it assigns illustrated positions for sexual intercourse to certain constellations. The connection between the color red — and all the psychological implications associated with it — and sexuality gives the picture further possibilities for interpretation. Egglestoon resisted interpretations of the content of his pictures. "There is no particular reason to search for meaning." The photographer wanted above all to create a purely visual event using the theme in his pictures. "The object of mundane experience is taken as a visual phenomenon, the colors are not qualities of things, but rather parts of a pictorial logic." Accordingly, for Eggleston it is less a matter of a visual mirroring of the world in a documentary sense, than creating an individual pictorial reality. The exhibition was perceived by the critics in very different ways. Hilton Kramer of the New York Times reacted to Szarkowski's observation that these were perfect photographs with a scathing review: "Perfect? Perfectly banal, perhaps. Perfectly boring, certainly … The truth is, these pictures belong to the world of shapshot chic." The fact that photographs, which were termed a "mess" by the critics, were presented in the expensive dye-transfer process also created displeasure. In an overview of the year one critic termed it "The Most hated show of the year;" it was a good opportunity for the critics to get even with Szarkowski's modernistic exhibition program. However, there were also some positive opinions that validated the potential of using color in Eggleston's photographs and the overall quality of the work by contemporary photographers: "This movement is concerned with finding photography's true nature. These contemporary photographers are trying to express what things really look like and what experience is really about. Their technique is not to extract from reality and make images larger and more perfect than life, but to suggest the random, impermanent, constantly-shifting quality of existence at the same time they select and isolate some part of it through the very act of photographing." Eggleston uses the possibility of structuring color in his dye-transfer prints so subtly and cleverly within the spirit of his concept that the observer is able to find a personal, emotional access to his pictures. This was clear also in a discussion about the exhibition: "What makes his photographs of nonevents so meaningful is his use of color to convey the 'feel' of a particular place. He emphasizes hues that soak the scene or resonate in a critical way, virtually creating effects of sound, silence, smell, temperature, pressure — sensations that black-and-white photography has yet to to evoke." William Eggleston's Guide shows the author's love-hate relationship with subjects involving the American cultural landscape. Every imaginable daily object almost automatically finds its way into his pictorial world. Often framed so that the relationships of the pictured people and objects to their surroundings become clear, the visible shapes of the apparently normal and customary provide the source material for Eggleston's art. As in the films of Alfred Hitchcock, his works are characterized by a thickening of atmosphere that expresses itself in a latent threat. Under the mask of the deceptive calm of the ordinary, everything unfathomable appears possible. Perhaps this artistic conversion of his visual psychograph of the American middle class was the true cause for the rejection. "There was also something disturbing suggested by these images, something ominous. The empty shower brought to mind a torture chamber; a blood-red ceiling exploded like a violent hallucination; the open black oven could have been a suicide's last glimpse of the world." In retrospect, Eggleston's exhibition at the MOMA was a turning point in the recognition of color photography as an artistic medium. In a short, informal, and experimental exhibition at Yale University the same year as his controversial exhibition at MOMA, Eggleston showed his video clips on four monitors along with his large-format photographs of night life, and his color photographs, projected in two slide shows. Interested observers came to this presentation from the entire east coast. This parallel presentation of different visual media was never again used by the artist. At the same time, Eggleston accepted an assignment from Rolling Stone magazine to photograph future President Jimmy Carter's home area in Georgia. In 1977 he published the series in two volumes of original photos. This was the first cooperative work with the young photographer Cotty Chubb, an heir to the Chubb insurance fortune, as publisher; it was followed in succeeding years by further publications in the form of portfolios and art books. In the 80s Eggleston was invited to photograph in various film shoots, and he had a small part in a film. In 1983 Elvis Presley Enterprises hired him to photograph Elvis's house in Memphis for a tourist guide. In the "Graceland" portfolio published in 1984, Eggleston showed the house, which the King had furnished himself, as the mausoleum of a man with strange taste. The dye-transfer prints seem to be soaked with artificial colors. The observer has the dizzying sense of seeing himself a hundred times in numerous mirrors, losing himself in the depths of the thick carpets, and suffocating in the depressing confinement of the rooms decorated with curios. The acceptance in Europe of Eggleston's work began at this time. In addition to London, where he had a solo exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1983, he showed his pictures in Berlin and Graz. In Berlin, his photos were presented in the workshop for photography founded by the photographer Michael Schmidt; in Graz by Christine Frisinghelli and Manfred Willmann under the aegis of the Steirischer Herbst, a cultural festival that takes place regularly. His photographs were quickly received, and they served as a model for a younger generation of photographers such as Peter Fraser, Paul Graham, and Martin Parr in England and Joachim Brohm, Volker Heinze, and Wilmar König in Germany, when they adopted color photography as a medium for their artistic self expression. In fairly long visits to Europe, Eggleston began various photographic projects that were partially exhibited and published, but they remained unfinished. Some of these photographs found their way into the longterm project on which Eggleston worked continuously during the 80s. The Democratic Forest appeared in 1989 and was the first monograph by the now legandary photographer since the appearance of William Eggleston's Guide in 1976. The title of the work described the photographer's work method: "I had this notion of what I called a democratic way of looking around: that nothing was more important or less important." The series, which consisted of thousands of color prints and was compressed into 150 images for the publication by Eggleston and the publisher Mark Holborn, could be the illustrations for an imaginary trip by the photographer. It began on the family farm in Mississippi and continued through various American cities and as far as the Berlin Wall, which still existed at the time, and back again. The photographs are largely empty of people; they show landscapes, cityscapes, buildings, and interiors. Leaves, branches, and trees as symbols of nature, and telephone poles and cars, synonyms for transportation and communication, indicate the growing together of an increasingly international landscape and society. Through Eggleston's "democratic camera," every detail, no matter how insignificant, takes on meaning. Despite a few autobiographical motifs, in Holborn's view the pictures go beyond the individual in their arrangement as a series. "Eggleston is a virtuoso at transforming the ordinary into the extraordinary, a power that lies in the heart of photography. His work grants us access to a private world in which we might recognize a wider one. Its dimensions are both intimate and universal, its language both lyrical and profoundly disturbing." At the start of the 90s, with the help of Cotty Chubb, who in the meantime was working as a movie producer in Los Angeles, the Eggleston Artistic Trust was founded; its headquarters is in Memphis. At first it was directed by Eggleston's older son William III, but Chubb took over management in the mid-90s, and Eggleston's younger son Winston began to handle the organization of the trust. As a consequence, various portolios of dye-transfer prints from early slides and current works were printed in conjunction with the gallerist Howard Read from the New York gallery Cheim & Reid. The photographer tried out new digital printing techniques and started the tradition of using completely different photo development processes, from the least to the most costly, for the production of exhibition prints from his groups of photos. Eggleston also accepted assignments and photographed outside the US in Europe, Arabia, Africa, Russia, China, and Japan. His worldwide activities found expression in publications and exhibitions; he continues to be honored with many awards, and enjoys international cult status with a younger generation. The trust put together the artist's archives. In 2001 William Eggleston, his son Winston, Cotty Chubb, Howard Read, and Walter Hopps selected 75 photographs from the Los Alamos series. The pictures were produced as dye-transfer prints. Although the process had been discontinued by Kodak, the New York printer Guy Stricherz still had enough chemicals on hand to produce the project in this form. Before his death in 2005, Hopps, who had stored the negatives from the series for decades, saw the series published and exhibited on an international tour. Also the video segments from the start of the1970s were assembled into a narrative structure under the title Stranded in Canton by the film producer Robert Gordon, with help from Chubb. The provocative video was shown at film festivals and selected theaters. Eggleston has also been working in Paris for some time. In work books that the artist laid out, he arranged his photographs with drawings on facing pages. His photos have become increasingly abstract and create an autonomous effect, to the extent possible in the medium of photography. As so often with Eggleston's projects, a stay in a place and the company of friends on excursions is the cause and the trigger for taking photos. The Eggleston's most famous photographs now regularly command high prices at international art auctions. Having become a legend during his own lifetime, he runs the danger of stagnating artistically. There is a great danger of repeating pictorial strategies that have been tried before. Eggleston knows that it is easy for him to photograph variants of his successful pictures again. To avoid that type of dead-end street, he occasionally did not look through the viewfinder of his camera while taking a picture and was surprised by the results. Often he also further developed his stylistic medium with another theme while working on a series, or practiced several different artistic skills at the same time. "And then I had the attitude that I had done everything that I could do in that genre. Whether that's true or not, but that's the way it felt …" The photographs by Eggleston that have the greatest effect originated in the south of the US. The photographer developed from the subject world of an easily comprehensible geographic region, "this is Eggleston country," as did before him the author William Faulkner with the creation of the fictitious area Yoknapatawpha, a conception of the world, which despite its regional restrictions, had an expansive, universally valid character. Walter Hopps described this paradox: "There are three photographers — Robert Frank, Diane Arbus, and Eggleston — who have shown me the images of my lifetime. And of the three, Bill is the only one with ambitions for photography that go beyond the making of a single perfect picture, who keeps his work centered on turf, as though the center of the cosmos were the Mississippi Delta." His photographs connect apparent intimacy with the accessibility of the snapshot. At the same time they evade a quick and unambiguous interpretation through the strange or unfamiliar perspective, the chosen detail, and the subjective color control that each picture opens for associations on the part of the observer. In conjunction with the stylistic means that typified him, Eggleston's "democratic camera," which sees all objects as worthy of portrayal, gives them a thoroughly disconcerting life of their own. His pictures charge situations and objects with a deeper significance and allow them to surpass themselves with unsettling power. All good art, even literature and film, exhibits this irritating quality. In his short stories, the American writer Raymond Carver also masterfully achieved this balancing act between description of the ordinary and simultaneous threatening disaster, between boredom and explosion of power. Directors such as Gus van Sant and Sophia Coppola have also come under the influence of Eggleston's photographs: "It was the beauty of banal details that were inspirational." Published in: William Eggleston. Democratic Camera. Photographs and Video, 1961-2008; edited by Whitney Museum of Art and Haus der Kunst, ISBN 978-0-300-12621-1 |
William Eggleston, Greenwood, Mississippi, 1973, Dye transfer print, 40,5 x 50,6 cm, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Gift of Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz, © Eggleston Artistic Trust.
William Eggleston, Video still from Stranded in Canton, c.1973-74.
William Eggleston, Video still from Stranded in Canton, c.1973-74.
William Eggleston, Memphis, c. 1969-70, from William Eggleston’s Guide, 1976, Dye transfer print, 15-15/16 x 19-15/16, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; gift of Mr. Morris R. Garfinkle, © Eggleston Artistic Trust.
William Eggleston, Untitled, 1975, Dye transfer print, 16 x 20", Cheim & Read, New York, © Eggleston Artistic Trust.
William Eggleston, Untitled, c.1971-73, from Troubled Waters, 1980, Dye transfer print, 16 x 20, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; museum purchase with the aid of funds from the National Endowment for the Arts, Washington, D.C., a federal agency, and the Polaroid Foundation, © Eggleston Artistic Trust.
William Eggleston, Untitled, c.1971-73, from Troubled Waters, 1980, Dye transfer print, 16 x 20, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; museum purchase with the aid of funds from the National Endowment for the Arts, Washington, D.C., a federal agency, and the Polaroid Foundation, © Eggleston Artistic Trust.
William Eggleston, Video still from Stranded in Canton, c.1973-74.
William Eggleston, Sumner, Mississippi, 1969-1971, Dye transfer print, 34 x 52,3 cm, Niedersächsische Sparkassenstiftung, Hannover, © Eggleston Artistic Trust.
William Eggleston, Tallahatchie County, Mississippi, c. 1969-71, from William Eggleston’s Guide, 1976, Dye transfer print, 8-13/16 x 13-3/8", Niedersächsische Sparkassenstiftung, Hannover, © Eggleston Artistic Trust.
William Eggleston, Karco, c. 1983-86, from The Democratic Forest, 1989, Exhibition print, 16 x 20", Cheim & Read, New York, © Eggleston Artistic Trust.
William Eggleston, Video still from Stranded in Canton, c.1973-74.
William Eggleston, Untitled (St. Simons Island, Georgia), 1978 from Morals of Vision, 1978, Dye transfer print, 15-3/4 x 19-15/16", Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Gift of Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz 94.113, © Eggleston Artistic Trust.
William Eggleston, Untitled (Peaches), 1973, Dye transfer print, 16 x 20", Collection of Winston Eggleston, © Eggleston Artistic Trust.
William Eggleston, Untitled, 1965-68 and 1972-74, from Los Alamos, 2003, Dye transfer print, 12 x 17-3/4", Private collection, © Eggleston Artistic Trust.
William Eggleston, Untitled, 1976, from Election Eve, 1976, Exhibition print, 16 x 20", © Eggleston Artistic Trust.
William Eggleston, Untitled, 1965-68 and 1972-74, from Los Alamos, 2003, Dye transfer print, 12 x 17-3/4", Private collection, © Eggleston Artistic Trust.
William Eggleston, Untitled, 1976, from Election Eve, 1976, Exhibition print, 16 x 20", © Eggleston Artistic Trust.
William Eggleston, Untitled, 1965-68 and 1972-74, from Los Alamos, 2003, Dye transfer print, 17-¾ x 12, Private collection, © Eggleston Artistic Trust.
William Eggleston, Untitled, (Memphis, Tennessee), 1971, from 14 Pictures, 1974, Dye transfer print 15-7/8 x 19-15/16, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; gift of Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz 94.112, © Eggleston Artistic Trust.
William Eggleston, Untitled, 1971, from 10.D.70.V2, 1996, Dye transfer print, 16 x 20", Collection of Emily Fisher Landau, © Eggleston Artistic Trust.
William Eggleston, Untitled, from 5 x 7, 1973, printed 2005, Gelatin silver print, 38 x 26-3/4", Cheim & Read, New York, © Eggleston Artistic Trust.
William Eggleston, Huntsville, Alabama, 1971, from William Eggleston’s Guide, 1976, Dye transfer print, 20 x 15-7/8, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; gift of Virginia M. Zabriskie 91.100.3, © Eggleston Artistic Trust.
William Eggleston, Untitled, n.d., from Los Alamos, 1965-68 and 1972-74 (published 2003.) 1965-68 and 1972-74, Dye transfer print, 17 ¾ x 12 in (45.1 x 30.5 cm.), Private collection.© Eggleston Artistic Trust, courtesy Cheim & Read, New York.
William Eggleston, Morton, Mississippi, c. 1969-70, from William Eggleston’s Guide, 1976, Dye transfer print, 20-9/16 x 13-3/8", Niedersächsische Sparkassenstiftung, Hannover, © Eggleston Artistic Trust.
William Eggleston, Untitled, 1965-68 and 1972-74, from Los Alamos, 2003, Dye transfer print, 17-¾ x 12", Private collection, © Eggleston Artistic Trust.
William Eggleston, Untitled, 1965-68 and 1972-74, from Los Alamos, 2003, Dye transfer print, 17-3/4 x 12", Private collection, © Eggleston Artistic Trust.
William Eggleston, Untitled, 1965-68 and 1972-74, from Los Alamos, 2003, Dye transfer print, 17-3/4 x 12", Private collection, © Eggleston Artistic Trust.
William Eggleston, Untitled, from William Eggleston’s Graceland, 1984, Dye transfer print, 24 x 20", Collection of Marcia Dunn and Jonathan Sobel, © Eggleston Artistic Trust.
William Eggleston, Untitled, from William Eggleston’s Graceland, 1984, Dye transfer print, 24 x 20", Collection of Marcia Dunn and Jonathan Sobel, © Eggleston Artistic Trust.
William Eggleston, Memphis, c. 1969-71, from William Eggleston’s Guide, 1976, Dye transfer print, 28-3/8 x 21-1/4, Collection of John Cheim, © Eggleston Artistic Trust. |
William Eggleston, Untitled, 1965-68 and 1972-74, from Los Alamos, 2003, Dye transfer print, 16 x 20, Collection of Emily Fisher Landau, © Eggleston Artistic Trust. |
