William Eggleston and The Rise of Color Photography
Page II
What Arthur Danto said of Warhol’s Brillo Boxes might also be applied to Eggleston’s photographs: “the artwork takes the non-artwork as its subject-matter and simultaneously makes a point about how the subject-matter is presented. The mode of representation thus creates a surplus meaning which does not allow the two objects to be equated with one another.”(11)
In 1974, Eggleston was awarded the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship to begin a new series of dye transfers that he called The Los Alamos Project. During this time, he continued to work with Szarkowski, editing an earlier body of 375 prints for his solo exhibition. When Eggleston’s opening day at The Museum of Modern Art arrived on May 25, 1976, he might not have been prepared for the harsh negative reaction. He was treated to Ruscha’s “huh factor.” Viewers did not understand the unprecedented assortment of 75 images, seemingly taken at random, and often presented in lurid color. They could not appreciate why Eggleston had chosen the subject matter he had and resented the fact that Szarkowski was presenting it as fine art. Leading the attack, Hilton Kramer said of one print that if he really wanted to see a pair of shoes under a bed he could go home and look at his own. He dismissed the work as “snapshot chic.”(12) Accustomed to only seeing black and white photographs in a museum, the viewers were simply taken aback. Ansel Adams was so disturbed that he wrote a letter to Szarkowski, complaining that the work was even hanging on the museum’s walls. Owen Edwards, of The Village Voice, referred to the exhibition as one of the most hated of the year. Those who objected to the use of dye transfers to present ordinary subjects missed the point entirely and failed to grasp that a conceptual art strategy had been deployed, which demanded a new visual orientation.
In his introduction to William Eggleston’s Guide, the leatherette covered monograph that accompanied Eggleston’s solo exhibition, Szarkowski himself speculates on whether his style was calculated, but coyly refuses to draw any specific conclusions.
Eggleston...shows us pictures of aunts and cousins and friends, of houses in the neighborhood and in neighboring neighborhoods, of local streets and side roads, local strangers, odd souvenirs, all of this appearing not at all as it might in a social document, but as it might in a diary, where the important meanings would not be 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.(13)
It would appear that on the level of personal intentions, Szarkowski might have been as perplexed by Eggleston as the editors of Artforum had been by Ruscha. Eggleston’s comments about his work tend to be cryptic or self-deprecating, and he once managed to achieve both by telling Alfred H. Barr, Jr., the founding director of the Museum of Modern Art, that his photographs were compositionally based on the pattern of the Confederate flag.(14) Making such a comparison was Eggleston’s way of communicating that some of his subjects, like the crossing bars of the Confederate flag, were located in the exact center of the field of vision. However, given that he had achieved many unique compositions, choosing odd vantage points and frequent low angle shots, his comment to Barr could, in fact, be interpreted as a bit of posturing designed to conceal his objective.
In raising color photography to the level of consciousness in the art world, Eggleston and Szarkowski had won an important victory. Like it or not, the critics were confronted with an exhibition calculated to gain serious recognition for the medium, which would give the next generation of photographers much greater freedom of expression. It was an aesthetic paradigm shift that prompted Szarkowski to hail Eggleston as “the beginning of modern color photography.”(15) As Jim Lewis commented,
In a way, Eggleston did for color photography what the Dutch Masters of the genre did for painting in the 16th and 17th centuries: He took it out of the hands of the wealthy institutions that had sponsored it (fashion magazines and advertising agencies in one case, the church in the other) and turned it into an expression of the everyday. It is not so far, after all, from the vulgar to the vernacular: Eggleston bridged the gap, and in so doing delivered color photography back into the hands of art.(16)
It took more than a decade for his work to gain a secure foothold. During that time, he exhibited in a growing number of solo and group exhibitions internationally, particularly in Europe. He is now represented in the permanent collections of most major art museums in the world, and he has had a profound impact on the current generation of photographers, who came of age after the proliferation of color television. They are accustomed to seeing the world represented in color and not in black and white.
Rejecting aesthetic hierarchy and any notion of canonical images within his oeuvre, Eggleston contends that he is “photographing democratically.”(17) It is a way of working that he adopted early and continues to pursue, stubbornly refusing to select one scene or image as more important than another. They are all equal in his estimation, each one just as worthy of being framed in the viewfinder as the next. His ability to transform the mundane into a vibrant experience through saturated color and informal, yet balanced, compositions has been cited as an influence by some of the most important photographers working today, including Nan Goldin, Ryan McGinley, Juergen Teller, and Wolfgang Tillmans. Directors have also paid homage to his work, ranging from John Huston, Gus Van Sant, and Larry Clark to David Lynch, Sofia Coppola, and Harmony Korine.(18) There is a quality to Eggleston’s images that leaves one with the notion of a story unfolding beyond the edges of the print, that one image is not isolated, but part of a stream.
Color functions in Eggleston’s work on a broad sensory level, engaging the viewer in a way that black and white could not. His images evoke the feeling of heat under a glaring summer sun, the taste of highway diner food, the sound of blues music, the aroma of wisteria, and the pungent smell of earth after rain.
Reduced to monochrome, Eggleston’s designs would be in fact almost static, almost as blandly resolved as the patterns seen in kaleidoscopes; but they are perceived in color, where the wedge of purple necktie, or the red disk of the stoplight against the sky, has a different compositional torque than its equivalent panchromatic gray, as well as a different meaning. For Eggleston, who was perhaps never fully committed to photography in black and white, the lesson would be more easily and naturally learned, enabling him to make these pictures: real photographs, bits lifted from the visceral world with such tact and cunning that they seem true, seen in color from corner to corner.(19)
Taking everyday situations and objects as the locus of his artistic vision, Eggleston captures each image on its own merits in a moment of fresh recognition, as if seen for the first time, not taking anything for granted. The most ordinary scene is transformed into something recognizable, yet strange and disorienting, demanding further examination. One might infer from this approach a visual parallel to defamiliarization, a literary device in which the adoption of a naïve perspective by the author disturbs the reader’s habitual perceptions of the world. This parallel is all the more striking, given Eggleston’s response once when asked what he thought he was accomplishing with his photographs: “I think of them as parts of a novel I’m doing.”(20)
In an essay in The Democratic Forest, a book of photographs published in 1989, Eggleston was inclined to take aim at his early critics and at those whose lack of visual curiosity will only allow them to accept what is familiar:
I am afraid that there are more people than I can imagine who can go no further than appreciating a picture that is a rectangle with an object in the middle of it, which they can identify. They don’t care what is around the object itself, right there in the centre. Even after the lessons of Winogrand and Friedlander, they don’t get it. They respect their work because respectable institutions tell them that they are important artists, but what they really want to see is a picture with a figure or an object in the middle of it. They want something obvious. The blindness is apparent when someone lets slip the word ‘snapshot.’ Ignorance can always be covered by ‘snapshot.’ The word has never had any meaning. I am at war with the obvious.(21)
One is left to wonder whether this attack was an act of self-defensiveness born out of initial rejection as a photographer, or out of complete disdain for those whom he considers to be visually illiterate. Perhaps it was both. Can he really fault his early viewers for being slow to understand his peripheral way of looking at the world, mistaking him for a casual snapshot shooter? Innovation in art has always taken time to resonate with the public.
Over the years, Eggleston has acquired a reputation as a dandy Southern gentleman with a Faulknerian proclivity for alcohol consumption, discharging firearms, and late night prowling, although he just turned 70 years old. He once maintained two houses in Memphis, one for his wife, Rosa, and another for a mistress, Lucia Birch, who recently died. The two reportedly knew and liked one another. Inherited family wealth freed him from the necessity of working for a living, allowing him to take frequent photographic excursions, produce thousands of prints, and concentrate on his other passion, musical composition. Many of those who have interviewed Eggleston and written about him have referenced his eccentricities, while neglecting to contextualize his work. A 2005 documentary film by Michael Almereyda, William Eggleston in the Real World, struck a balance between the two, but showed the legendary photographer at his laconic best.
Last year, a major Eggleston retrospective opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Democratic Camera: Photographs and Video 1961-2008. With 175 works included, it was his most comprehensive exhibition in New York since the solo debut at The Museum of Modern Art. It was also a crowning moment for his career, a triumphal return to Gotham. Critical reaction to the exhibition and to his achievements was overwhelmingly favorable, indicating just how widely accepted his images and way of seeing have become. Holland Cotter of The New York Times proclaimed him to be “one of our greatest living photographers.”(22) Writing for The New Yorker, Peter Schjeldahl observed,
I think the emotional key to his genius is a stoical loathing, unblinking in the face of one scandalously uncongenial otherness after another. His subjects have no ascertainable dignity, except that of stubbornly existing. Nor does the hurting hipster behind the camera. All glory, such as it is, accrues to the art of photography, which doesn’t care what it beholds even as it burns it, through the eye, into the soul.(23)
Events in the art world tend to come full circle. Just as Duchamp’s urinal was despised when first submitted for consideration, the critics eventually praised its aesthetic qualities. So it was with Eggleston’s subject matter taken from the margins of society, from lonely back roads and industrial complexes, abandoned buildings and strip malls, urban centers and quiet residential rooms in the fleeting light of day. Scorned early in his career, he is now considered a master of photography, although he will remain an enigma until someone discovers a Rosetta stone to translate his thoughts. Apropos of an enigma, Eggleston once told his friend, the curator Thomas Weski, that he did not particularly like the things around him. Weski replied that he thought that was a good reason to photograph, which satisfied Eggleston. There is much more for this artist to reveal of the world, and he shows no signs of slowing down.
Notes
© Bryan Hiott—Nietzsche Circle, 2010
(published in Hyperion: On the Future of Aesthetics, a web publication of The Nietzsche Circle: www.nietzschecircle.com, May 2010)
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