William Eggleston and The Rise of Color Photography

by Bryan Hiott

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Published in Hyperion: On the Future of Aesthetics, a web publication of The Nietzsche Circle: www.nietzschecircle.com, May 2010. Copyright © 2010 Bryan Hiott and The Nietzsche Circle. All essays, interviews, and reviews are shared copyright between author(s) and The Nietzsche Circle. All rights reserved. Please contact editors for any concerns or for usage rights.

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In 1976, William Eggleston became the first photographer to receive a solo exhibition of color prints at The Museum of Modern Art. The exhibition generated controversy and outrage among professional critics not only because the work was in color and violated the prevailing preference for black and white photography, but also because of the ordinary subject matter depicted. Writing for The New York Times, Hilton Kramer described Eggleston’s images of family and personal acquaintances, suburban Memphis landscapes, and architectural interiors as “…perfectly banal, perhaps. Perfectly boring, certainly.”(1) However, during the 33 years following that exhibition, color prints have become the predominant medium among professional photographers and are in the permanent collections of major art museums worldwide. Eggleston’s solo debut was perhaps more influential than any other exhibition in bringing about the acceptance of color prints as fine art.

In spite of all that has been written about him, Eggleston remains an elusive figure, whose reticent manner has given rise to misunderstanding about his origin as a photographer. The story is often repeated that Eggleston’s career began suddenly one day in 1967, when he appeared at The Museum of Modern Art with a suitcase full of his Kodachrome slides for Chief Curator of Photography John Szarkowski. Although that meeting did take place, during which a professional relationship was established, it has been endowed with a mythic quality that distracts from the most significant factors involved in Eggleston’s emergence. First, he was aided by the critical acceptance of Pop Art in the 1960s and the movement’s preoccupation with everyday objects as the materials of fine art. Second, his strategy of appropriating the dye transfer process, an expensive and highly archival printing method normally used for high-end advertising images of consumer goods, places him within the dominant mode of conceptual art practice in the 1970s. Third, he spent nine years cultivating a relationship with Szarkowski, working with him to edit a large number of photographs to create a portfolio that would become the basis for his solo exhibition. Szarkowski’s curatorial backing was crucial in overcoming the critics’ skepticism of color photography.

To gain some understanding of how Pop Art and conceptual strategies influenced Eggleston, one need look no further than the work of Ed Ruscha. Although he considered photography to be merely one tool of his practice, Ruscha was a key figure in redefining acceptable content for image making. As Sylvia Wolf notes,

The proposition set forth by Ruscha and others – that art could be found among or made out of everyday objects and activities – coincided with a profound questioning of convention and anti-establishment sentiment that had been growing for a decade.(2)

In 1963, Ruscha self-published Twentysix Gasoline Stations, a small book of black and white photographs of gasoline stations along U.S. Route 66. The publication was subversive in that it lavished great attention on utilitarian structures that the public might not have given a second glance. “What I really want is a professional polish, a clear cut machine finish,” said Ruscha. “I am not trying to create a precious limited edition, but a mass produced object of high order.”(3) Ruscha’s series of gasoline stations situated in the Southwest were the photographic equivalent of Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup cans. Both artists were exploring mass production within a consumer society by elevating ordinary subjects to the level of aesthetic contemplation. Ruscha’s images could not have been more different from the exacting gelatin silver prints of pristine landscapes that Ansel Adams had captured with his view camera in the same geographic area.

Eggleston recently acknowledged a debt to Ruscha in his introduction to a book of photographs by Huger Foote, entitled My Friend From Memphis:

In the 1960’s, Ed did a book about gas stations from all over the country. Then he did another of every single building on Sunset Strip. That gave us all food for thought.(4)

It was Ruscha’s use of American vernacular forms, demonstrating a willingness to question prevailing assumptions of aesthetic merit, which drew Eggleston’s attention.

Ruscha was following a long-established practice in Modernism, originating with the Dada movement, of challenging what the art world deemed to be acceptable content for exhibition. A primary exponent of Dada was Marcel Duchamp, who submitted Fountain, a porcelain urinal bearing the signature “R. Mutt,” to an open exhibition of The Society of Independent Artists in 1917. The work was greeted with indignation and rejected by the exhibition committee. Max Podstolski writes in his essay “The Elegant Pisser, Fountain By R. Mutt,”

His ruse, it appears, was intended to test the 'artistic freedom' espoused by the Society of Independent Artists, which he had helped found. The Society's moral indignation over Fountain prompted Duchamp to write, purportedly in Mutt's defense, that the mere act of choosing was enough to qualify any object as 'art'. Thus was his theory of the readymade conceptualized.(5)

As the Dada movement came to fruition in the early 1920s, its goal continued to be the elevation of non-art objects to the status of high art, with the hope of shocking the bourgeoisie out of their complacency. It was acceptable to Dada practitioners if works were marked by complete absurdity or incongruity. Ruscha was operating in the same mode when he self-published Twentysix Gasoline Stations in addition to the books that followed: Various Small Fires and Milk, Some Los Angeles Apartments, Every Building on Sunset Strip, Thirtyfour Parking Lots, Nine Swimming Pools, and Some Real Estate Opportunities.

Artforum reviewed Twentysix Gasoline Stations in its September 1963 issue. As one might expect, the response was rather mixed:

Not quite a joke, the idea is at least as complex as the puns posed by Duchamp’s urinal; we are irritated and annoyed by the act; but feel compelled to resolve the questions it raises. The urinal was resolved in favor of Duchamp; for Ruscha and the movement he represents, the issue is still in doubt.(6)

Not content with mere publicity, Ruscha attempted to donate his first book to The Library of Congress the following month. His proposed gift was refused. Rather than forgetting about this unpleasant experience, he went on to memorialize it by purchasing advertising space in Artforum and announcing his rejection to the public as if to make it a point of honor. The confused reactions to the subject matter of his publications, the “huh factor” as Ruscha called it, would figure prominently in future discussions of his photographic work.(7) There would always be a sizable percentage of viewers who simply could not comprehend why anyone would want to photograph the things he did. The negative reaction to Eggleston’s color photographs more than a decade later would follow the same pattern of initial confusion and rejection.

By the time of Eggleston’s 1976 solo debut, the Pop Art movement was over, having gained critical acceptance and institutional backing. Eggleston had produced a portion of the color images in that exhibition during the late 1960s when the movement was still in vogue. However, the critics did not place him in that context even though Eggleston had brought to color photography the same sort of everyday subject matter that Ruscha had brought to the medium of black and white prints. Ruscha’s eventual acceptance was due more to his large-scale oil paintings, some of which were derived from his photographs. Eggleston was hampered by the fact that he was exhibiting exclusively as a photographer and was being judged against the conventions of traditional black and white prints, which were the museum standard for photography.

Among Eggleston’s early detractors, there was a dictum that color photographs were more appropriate to commercial advertising than to fine art. There were notable exceptions to this dictum. Paul Outerbridge, Eliot Porter, and Ernst Haas had produced some remarkable color prints between the 1930s and 1950s; but they did not succeed in breaking down the aesthetic bias against the medium. In addition, Stephen Shore was given a solo exhibition of color prints at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1971. Shore’s palette was similar to Eggleston’s, but his compositions related more to the social documentary style of Walker Evans, who had once referred to color photography as vulgar before taking it up himself with a Polaroid camera. Even though Shore’s exhibition achieved some favorable reviews, it failed to act as a catalyst for the acceptance of color.

When Eggleston took up photography in the late 1950s, he worked in black and white, showing the compositional influence of Henri Cartier-Bresson and The Decisive Moment. In 1965, he began experimenting with 35mm color negative film, subsequently adopting Kodachrome, as he attempted to master the medium using a Leica rangefinder camera. During several late night visits to commercial photo labs in Memphis, he watched hundreds of amateur 4 x 6 color prints roll by in rapid succession on the processing machines. The varied subject matter in those prints, though often poorly composed, awakened his sense of what could be accomplished with his own color images. As Eggleston remarked, “It was one of the most exciting and unforgettable experiences as a whole—and educational for me.”(8) Some critics have suggested that visiting commercial photo labs might have prompted him to adopt a snapshot aesthetic.

Cutting against the grain, Eggleston was perfectly positioned for a backlash against his work, a new and highly personal look at the world that could slip unnoticed into a family photo album. Yet Szarkowski was proposing to elevate this work to the status of fine art with the imprimatur of The Museum of Modern Art, a provocative move for a curator with a growing reputation for pushing the envelope of representation. With the New Documents exhibition in 1967, he had introduced three photographers—Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander, and Garry Winogrand—who represented a significant departure from the objective social stance epitomized by Walker Evans’s generation of photographers. Their work was more personal and edgy. Arbus’s drag queens and circus freaks, Winogrand’s suspicious, tense pedestrians, and Friedlander’s complex visual puns would not have been likely candidates for the upbeat, formal prints in the Family of Man exhibition produced by Szarkowski’s predecessor Edward Steichen in 1955. However, in at least one respect, their work maintained the status quo: all three printed in black and white. Eggleston established friendships with the participants of New Documents, sharing their awareness of Walker Evans’s images, as well as a determination not to mimic his style. What Eggleston objected to was the direct frontal view so prevalent in Evans’s images.

While serving as a guest lecturer at The Carpenter Center of Harvard University from 1973-1974, Eggleston became interested in the dye transfer process as a possibility for his final prints. He wanted to have the greatest possible control over the range of color and realized that dye transfers would allow him to achieve just that.

I was reading the price list of this lab in Chicago and 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 that 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.(9)

In the 1970s, dye transfer printing was the chosen method of advertisers and magazine publishers because it rendered the most accurate image reproductions in print. It is a complicated, expensive, and labor-intensive process involving several separate steps to complete. A dye transfer print requires making three separation negatives from an original color transparency. The transparency is photographed in black and white using an individual red, green, and blue filter in sequence. A mold is made from each negative by exposing it to a gelatin-coated film. That film is developed in a solution that hardens the part of the mold to which light has been exposed, and the excess gelatin is washed away. Next, each mold is subjected to a dye bath according to which of the red, green or blue filters it had been previously exposed. The final step is transferring the dyes from each of the molds sequentially and in exact alignment onto a gelatin-coated paper, which completes the process.(10)

After hiring a professional printer to make his dye transfers, Eggleston provided detailed instructions on how he wanted the images to appear, correcting color or exaggerating it for a particular effect. The first two images that he had produced were Greenwood Moose Lodge, the facade of a rural cinderblock structure, and Red Ceiling, a light fixture with its exposed white wiring against a shocking red background. He was so pleased with the intensity of the colors that he adopted dye transfer as his primary printing method, and this met with Szarkowski’s endorsement, as well. Using that process to produce views of everyday subjects was both an aesthetic and conceptual choice that might be considered of the same lineage as Duchamp’s Fountain and Ruscha’s machine finished images. The process carried the commercial connotation of highly desirable consumer products, which Eggleston subverted by printing scenes that most people might prefer to overlook: a rusting tricycle on a Memphis sidewalk, the interior of a green-tiled shower stall, a pair of wingtip shoes under a bed, a dog lapping at a puddle of muddy water, and an assortment of empty plastic jugs in the middle of the Mississippi delta.

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