William Eggleston

(1939-)

William Eggleston’s Guide

Wikipedia

William Eggleston was born in Memphis, Tennessee and raised in Sumner, Mississippi. His father was an engineer and his mother was the daughter of a prominent local judge. As a boy, Eggleston was introverted; he enjoyed playing the piano, drawing, and working with electronics. From an early age, he was also drawn to visual media, and reportedly enjoyed buying postcards and cutting out pictures from magazines.

At the age of 15, Eggleston was sent to the Webb School, a boarding establishment. He later recalled few fond memories of the school, telling a reporter, “It had a kind of Spartan routine to ‘build character’. I never knew what that was supposed to mean. It was so callous and dumb. It was the kind of place where it was considered effeminate to like music and painting.” Eggleston was unusual among his peers in eschewing the traditional Southern male pursuits of hunting and sports, in favor of artistic pursuits and observation of the world. Nevertheless, Eggleston noted that he never felt like an outsider. “I never had the feeling that I didn't fit in,” he told a reporter, “But probably I didn't.”

Eggleston attended Vanderbilt University for a year, Delta State College for a semester, and the University of Mississippi for about five years, but did not complete any degree. Nonetheless, his interest in photography took root when a friend at Vanderbilt gave Eggleston a Leica camera. He was introduced to abstract expressionism at Ole Miss by visiting painter Tom Young.

Eggleston's early photographic efforts were inspired by the work of Robert Frank and Henri Cartier-Bresson's book, The Decisive Moment. Eggleston later recalled that the book was “the first serious book I found, from many awful books...I didn’t understand it a bit, and then it sank in, and I realized, my God, this is a great one.” First photographing in black-and-white, Eggleston began experimenting with color in 1965 and 1966 after being introduced to the medium by William Christenberry. Color transparency film became his dominant medium in the later 1960s. Eggleston’s development as a photographer seems to have taken place in relative isolation from other artists. In an interview, John Szarkowski describes his first encounter with the young Eggleston in 1969 as being “absolutely out of the blue.” After reviewing Eggleston’s work (which he recalled as a suitcase full of ‘drugstore’ color prints) Szarkowski prevailed upon the Photography Committee of MoMA to buy one of Eggleston's photographs.

In 1970, Eggleston’s friend William Christenberry introduced him to Walter Hopps, director of Washington, D.C.’s Corcoran Gallery. Hopps later reported being ‘stunned’ by Eggleston’s work: “I had never seen anything like it.”

Eggleston taught at Harvard in 1973 and 1974, and it was during these years that he discovered dye-transfer printing; he was examining the price list of a photographic lab in Chicago when he read about the process. As Eggleston later recalled: “It advertised ‘from the cheapest to the ultimate print’. The ultimate print was a dye-transfer. I went straight up there to look and everything I saw was commercial work like pictures of cigarette packs or perfume bottles but the color saturation and the quality of the ink was overwhelming. I couldn’t wait to see what a plain Eggleston picture would look like with the same process. Every photograph I subsequently printed with the process seemed fantastic and each one seemed better than the previous one.” The dye-transfer process resulted in some of Eggleston’s most striking and famous work, such as his 1973 photograph entitled The Red Ceiling, of which Eggleston said, “The Red Ceiling is so powerful, that in fact I’ve never seen it reproduced on the page to my satisfaction. When you look at the dye it is like red blood that’s wet on the wall... A little red is usually enough, but to work with an entire red surface was a challenge.”

At Harvard, Eggleston prepared his first portfolio, entitled 14 Pictures (1974). Eggleston’s work was exhibited at MoMA in 1976. Although this was over three decades after MoMa had mounted a solo exhibition of color photographs by Eliot Porter, and a decade after MoMA had exhibited color photographs by Ernst Haas, the tale that the Eggleston exhibition was MoMA's first exhibition of color photography is frequently repeated, and the 1976 show is regarded as a watershed moment in the history of photography, by marking ‘the acceptance of color photography by the highest validating institution’ (in the words of Mark Holborn).

Around the time of his 1976 MoMA exhibition, Eggleston was introduced to Viva, the Andy Warhol ‘superstar’, with whom he began a long relationship. During this period Eggleston became familiar with Andy Warhol's circle, a connection that may have helped foster Eggleston’s idea of the ‘democratic camera’, Mark Holborn suggests. Also in the 1970s Eggleston experimented with video, producing several hours of roughly edited footage Eggleston calls Stranded in Canton. Writer Richard Woodward, who has viewed the footage, likens it to a ‘demented home movie’, mixing tender shots of his children at home with shots of drunken parties, public urination and a man biting off a chicken'’head before a cheering crowd in New Orleans. Woodward suggests that the film is reflective of Eggleston’s ‘fearless naturalism—a belief that by looking patiently at what others ignore or look away from, interesting things can be seen.’

Eggleston's published books and portfolios include Los Alamos (completed in 1974, but published much later), William Eggleston’s Guide (the catalog of the 1976 MoMa exhibit), the massive Election Eve (1977; a portfolio of photographs taken around Plains, Georgia, the rural seat of Jimmy Carter before the 1976 presidential election), The Morals of Vision (1978), Flowers (1978), Wedgwood Blue (1979), Seven (1979), Troubled Waters (1980), The Louisiana Project (1980), William Eggleston's Graceland (1984; a series of commissioned photographs of Elvis Presley’s Graceland, depicting the singer}s home as an airless, windowless tomb in custom-made bad taste), The Democratic Forest (1989), Faulkner’s Mississippi (1990), and Ancient and Modern(1992).

Some of his early series were not shown until the late 2000s. The Nightclub Portraits (1973), a series of large black-and-white portraits in bars and clubs around Memphis was, for the most part, not shown until 2005. Lost and Found, part of Eggleston’s Los Alamos series, is a body of photographs that have remained unseen for decades because until 2008 no one knew that they belonged to Walter Hopps; the works from this series chronicle road trips the artist took with Hopps, leaving from Memphis and traveling as far as the West Coast. Eggleston’s Election Eve photographs were not editioned until 2011.

Eggleston also worked with filmmakers, photographing the set of John Huston’s film Annie (1982) and documenting the making of David Byrne’s film True Stories (1986).

In 2017 an album of Eggleston’s music was released, Musik. It comprises 13 ‘experimental electronic soundscapes‘, ‘often dramatic improvisations on compositions by Bach (his hero) and Handel as well as his singular takes on a Gilbert and Sullivan tune and the jazz standard On the Street Where You Live’. Musik was made entirely on a 1980s Korg synthesiser, and recorded to floppy disks. The 2017 compilation Musik was produced by Tom Lunt, and released on Secretly Canadian. In 2018, Aine O’Drywer performed the music on a pipe organ at the Big Ears music festival in Knoxville.

Eggleston’s mature work is characterized by its ordinary subject-matter. As Eudora Welty noted in her introduction to The Democratic Forest, an Eggleston photograph might include “old tires, Dr Pepper machines, discarded air-conditioners, vending machines, empty and dirty Coca-Cola bottles, torn posters, power poles and power wires, street barricades, one-way signs, detour signs, No Parking signs, parking meters and palm trees crowding the same curb.”

Eudora Welty suggests that Eggleston sees the complexity and beauty of the mundane world: “The extraordinary, compelling, honest, beautiful and unsparing photographs all have to do with the quality of our lives in the ongoing world: they succeed in showing us the grain of the present, like the cross-section of a tree... They focus on the mundane world. But no subject is fuller of implications than the mundane world!” Mark Holborn, in his introduction to Ancient and Modern writes about the dark undercurrent of these mundane scenes as viewed through Eggleston’s lens: “[Eggleston’s] subjects are, on the surface, the ordinary inhabitants and environs of suburban Memphis and Mississippi—friends, family, barbecues, back yards, a tricycle and the clutter of the mundane. The normality of these subjects is deceptive, for behind the images there is a sense of lurking danger.” American artist Edward Ruscha said of Eggleston’s work, “When you see a picture he’s taken, you’re stepping into some kind of jagged world that seems like Eggleston World.”

According to Philip Gefter from Art & Auction, "It is worth noting that Stephen Shore and William Eggleston, pioneers of color photography in the early 1970s, borrowed, consciously or not, from the photorealists. Their photographic interpretation of the American vernacular—gas stations, diners, parking lots—is foretold in photorealist paintings that preceded their pictures.”

Excerpts

“The second failure in color photography comprises photographs of beautiful colors in pleasing relationships. The nominal subject matter of these pictures is often the walls of old buildings, or the prows of sailboats reflected in rippled water. Such photographs can be recognized by their resemblance to reproductions of Synthetic Cubist or Abstract Expressionist paintings. It is their unhappy fate to remind us of something similar but better.”

William Eggleston’s Guide; John Szarkowski; p. 9

“I once heard William Eggleston say that the nominal subjects of his pictures were no more than a pretext for the making of color photographs… I did not believe him, although I can believe that it might be an advantage to him to think so, or to pretend to thinks so. To me it seems that the pictures reproduced here are about the photographer’s home, about his place, in both important meanings of that word. One might say about his identity.”

William Eggleston’s Guide; John Szarkowski; P. 5, 6

“Eggleston, however, shows us pictures of aunts and cousins and friends, of houses in the neighborhood and in neighboring neighborhoods, or local streets and side roads, local strangers, odd souvenirs, all of this appearing not at all as it might in a diary, where the important meanings would be not public and general but private and esoteric. It is not clear whether the bucolic modesty of the work’s subject matter should be taken at face value or whether this should be understood as a posture, an assumed ingenuousness designed to camouflage the artist’s Faustian ambition.”

William Eggleston’s Guide; John Szarkowski; P. 10

“In Eggleston’s work… we see uncompromisingly private experience described in a manner that is restrained, austere, and public, a style not inappropriate for photographs that might be introduced as evidence in court.”

William Eggleston’s Guide; John Szarkowski; P. 11

“These subjects appear to be no more overtly interesting or exotic than those in our own family albums, no doe they identify themselves as representatives of a general human condition. They are simply present: clearly realized, precisely fixed, themselves, in the service of no extraneous roles. Or so the photographs would have us believe. In truth the people and places described here are not so sovereign as they seem, for they serve the role of subject matter. They serve Eggleston’s interests.

William Eggleston’s Guide; John Szarkowski; P. 11

“The simplicity of these pictures is (as the reader will have guessed) not so simple… [according to Eggleston] the pictures were based compositionally on the Confederate Flag… The response was presumably improvised and unresponsive, of interest only as an illustration of the lengths to which artists sometimes go to frustrate rational analysis of their work, as though they fear it might prove an antidote to their magic.”

William Eggleston’s Guide; John Szarkowski; P. 11

“… in concrete terms a quality central to Eggleston’s work: a lean, monocular intentness that fixes the subject as sharply as if it were recalled from eidetic memory.”

William Eggleston’s Guide; John Szarkowski; P. 12

“… real photographs, bits lifted from the visceral world with such tact and cunning that they seem true, seen in color from corner to corner.”

William Eggleston’s Guide; John Szarkowski; P. 12

“… Eggleston’s pictures do not seem concerned with large questions… They seem concerned simply with describing life.”

William Eggleston’s Guide; John Szarkowski; P. 12

“One can say that in these photographs form and content are indistinguishable—which means that the pictures mean precisely what they appear to mean. Attempting to translate these appearances into words is surely a fool’s errand… if our concern is for the meanings in pictures, verbal descriptions are finally gratuitous.”

William Eggleston’s Guide; John Szarkowski; P. 12, 13

“As pictures, however, these seem to me perfet: irreducible surroates for the experience they preten to record, visual analogures for the quality of one life, colletively a paradigm of a private vies, a view one would have thought ineffable, described here with clarity, fullness, and elegance.

William Eggleston’s Guide; John Szarkowski; P. 14

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Thoughts on Artists

“We have reached the point where we do not want to know any longer whose work it is, whose seal is affixed, whose stamp is upon it; what we want, and what at last we are about to get, are individual masterpieces which triumph in such a way as to completely subordinate the accidental artists who are responsible for them. Every man today who is really an artist is trying to kill the artist in himself—and he must, if there is to be any art in the future. We are suffering from a plethora of art. We are art-ridden. Which is to say that instead of a truly personal, truly creative vision of things, we have merely an aesthetic view.”

The Eye of Paris; Henry Miller; p. 175 (Brassaï’s photographs illustrated Miller’s writings)

“Most writers will know the huge importance a simple photograph can assume, how it can provide the germ of a story, inspire a poem, or jog the memory into recalling a whole other world or age.”

Brassaï and Literature; Roger Grenier; p. 210