On William Egglestons Democratic Camera

by Joshua Blank


It is hard to imagine a time when an artist’s work was not mediated by a statement of conceptual scaffolding, as is the custom today. Contemporary artists are often expected to be intelligible on an almost academic level—as though an explanation of the work was preferable to the work itself—and it is likely that their institutional training will inform their work in this respect. Today it is common to speak of artistic trends as the product of specific MFA programs, a state of affairs which many ridicule but few disobey. But what happens when an artist who has not received this type of education, and who provides no such structure in his work, goes on to become one of the greatest contemporary photographers?
William Eggleston, the subject of a retrospective at the Whitney Museum titled “The Democratic Camera” on view from November 2008 to January 2009. He has a huge following in America, in part because of his unusual status as a formally untrained artist, and his indifference to providing theoretical justification for his work. His silence on the subject of his work leaves his audience alone with the images, free to have their own ideas about the content. Eggleston has also demonstrated a disregard for what photography is supposed to look like: he was the first photographer to exhibit color images (at MoMA in 1976), at a time when ‘art photography’ was thought of in terms of black and white imagery. “The Democratic Camera” highlights fifty odd years of Eggleston’s photography and video work, and offers an opportunity to reconsider the proverbial controversy found by some critics of his art.
Born July 27th 1939 in Memphis Tennessee, the child of wealthy plantation owners, William Eggleston grew up in a racially segregated south, a region still shadowed by its history of slavery and the segregation that ensued in a direction of developing bi-racial equality. Moreover, it was a simple community not an academic hotbed for artistic theory, but a small southern city, the home of Elvis.   He began photographing in his late teens, acquiring his first camera in 1957, and attended several southern institutions without ever receiving a diploma.  At this time, Eggleston became aware of the photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, and his spontaneous street pictures of “decisive moments,” as well as Walker Evans’s “American Photographs” series. He made his first experiments in color photography in 1965. Eggleston’s work came to prominence in the late 60s through the support of the famous curator Walter Hopps, who set Eggleston on a path to fame as a father of color art photography, culminating in the famous MoMA retrospective of 1976.
William Eggleston's Whitney retrospective features nearly all of his known work, as well as some that are lesser-known. Stranded in Canton is an example of Eggleston's only video work, presented in a series of simultaneous running television monitors and subsequent Black and white portraits of the characters seen in his 14 hours of film depicting 60’s psychedelic festivity. The Whitney Museum in, New York in conjunction with Han Der Kunst, Munich curated this exhibition, and have linked the images by specific project, place and time. For example, portraits are grouped together because of their compositional similarities, Framing fashionable female subjects centrally in the frame.  Of the seven rooms in this exhibition, each room displayed work from specific books that he has published with text on each wall narrating their relevance historically in the context of his career but also in the context of fine art. One such grouping exhibited Eggleston’s early black and white work shot with his Leica 35mm camera, presenting the same kid of photographic structure found in his later color images.  These images however depicted black migrant workers as well as the white community in which Eggleston had been  raised.
When examined in such a large survey, the consistent feature of Eggleston’s images is that of selected experiences in vernacular landscapes, awkward interiors, and random encounters. Much of his work is a documentary chronicle of his experiences as a nomadic observer, surveying landscapes and their inhabitants both familiar and new. Eggleston describes what he photographs as about things that “cannot be described in words”, with no specific mission or agenda. He considers his process of photographing democratic because he believes that he gives each subject equal importance and attention (his presence can always be felt behind the camera lens), and because of his refusal to obey art photography’s conventions by using black and white film, his work may be received by some as rebellious.
 Eggleston’s MoMA exhibition drew intense criticism from traditional photographers, particularly the black and white landscape photographer Ansel Adams. Adams wrote a scathing letter to the exhibition curator John Szarkowski, asserting that Eggleston’s images were not technically competent enough to be accepted as fine art. Adams conducted his practice of photography under the guidance of strict rules of quality control and technological competence, planning his exposures with much consideration for each aspect of the photograph from the visual to the scientific, exposing the negative for several hours, and slowly allowing light to engrave its likeness on the emulsion. For Adams and some of his early contemporaries, the craft of photography was what validated their work as art. By comparison, Eggleston photographs much more freely moving quickly from subject to subject.
Color photography was used only in advertising before Eggleston’s initial exhibition at MoMA in 1967. Laszlo Moholy-Nagy took color photographs of his own family long before Eggleston, but this work went unknown until much later. After the MoMA show, other photographers began to gain recognition for their own color work, including Eggleston’s friend William Christenberry, and later Bruce Davidson as well as Helen Levitt, who used color to document street life in New York City. The acceptance of Eggleston’s color work by MoMA paved the way for color photography in a fine art context.
Today Eggleston’s stylistic influences can also be found in high-end catalog photography for brands like J Crew, Anthropology and A.P.C who use slice-of-life scenarios placed in picturesque landscapes to advertise their garments. Fine art photography is a major influence on the commercial arts. American Apparel’s photographic identity is based on close-up interiors with objects falling out of the frame lit by a glaring camera flash, a style that can be traced back to some of Eggleston’s early interiors depicting objects hung on walls, a light bulb on a red ceiling and a close-up of a darkly colored oven highlighted by his camera flash.
The filmmaker Gus Van Sant has also used Eggleston-like compositional ideas and stylistic color scenarios with interior and exterior shots, to compose portraits in his films.  He often shoots when the light is glowing warm yellow and blue in the shadows, exposing the dirt on the window of a car and the passenger who is backlit, partially obscured by the glare from the sun. One can feel the warmth that must have been pressing on the back of the subject’s head. This image has been reproduced in the documentary works of Ryan McGinley, Philip Lorca Di-Corcia and Eggleston’s successor in color photography, Stephen Shore.
The acceptance of color photography into fine art marks the beginning of our current visual language. William Eggleston’s color photographs introduced the language to wider audiences, sparking new critical analysis and new movements in photography. But Eggleston’s true subject is something that “cannot be identified in words”. The beauties of his images speak of a photographer who has made it his life’s work to find quiet pleasures wherever he goes.  


This image has been reproduced in the documentary works of Ryan McGinley, Philip Lorca Di-Corcia and Eggleston’s successor in color photography, Stephen Shore

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A portrait by Eggleston on the left and Gus Van Sant on the right.

                  


Bibliography

  1. “The Family of Man” created by Edward Stiechen, The Museum of Modern Art, New York 1955

  2. William Eggleston “Los Alamos” Scalo 2003

  3. “William Eggleston’s Guide” The Museum of Modern Art, New York 1975

  4. Laszo Moholy-Nagy “Color in Transparency 1934-1946” Steidl 2006

  5. Wim Wenders, “Written In The West” TeNeues 2000

  6. “William Eggleston in the Real World” directed by Michael Almereyda, Art House Films 2005

  7. The William Eggleston Trust (website/ historical timeline) http://www.egglestontrust.com/