I went to the IFC Center in Greenwich Village yesterday afternoon with my friend, Scott Moody, to see a documentary film about photographer William Eggleston, who is one of my favorite photographers. His official website generously shows the images from each of his monographs, as well as John Szarkowski’s introductory essay to the monograph William Eggleston’s Guide which accompanied the first solo exhibition of color photographs ever shown at the Museum of Modern Art in 1976. I saw a large exhibition of Eggleston’s work at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art from the Los Alamos Project, which continues his richly colored images of the ordinary. I describe him to myself as a Buddhist photographer because of the way his work seems to say that everything is worthy of notice, which turns out to be similar to the way he describes himself.
“I had this notion of what I called a democratic way of looking around, that nothing was more or less important," William Eggleston once said. This radical attitude guided his ground-breaking work in color photography, work that has prefigured many recent developments in art and photography. Los Alamos presents a series of photographs that has never before been shown, yet it contains a blueprint of Eggleston’s aesthetics, his subtle use of subdued color hues, the casual elegance of his trenchant observations of the mysteries of the mundane. The photographs in Los Alamos were shot in Eggleston’s native Memphis and on countless road trips across the American South from 1964 to 1968 and from 1972 to 1974. Initially, Eggleston wanted to create a vast compendium of more than 2000 photographs to be contained in 20 volumes; he wanted the viewer to look at the photographs the way one looks at the world. He eventually abandoned this project–and hardly any of the negatives were ever printed. Now, 30 years later, we finally get to see a selection of this encyclopedia of Southern everyday life and vernacular culture. It’s a stunning discovery that makes the so-called snapshot photography of recent years pale in comparison. Eggleston’s astonishingly timeless portraits, still lives, landscapes, and photographs of buildings add up to a profound investigation of the world and our way of looking at it, a poetics of pleasures hidden in full view. They transcend the merely descriptive and uncover the universal encapsulated in the details and the detritus of life in a consumer culture. (from Amazon.com)
The film offered intimate, often painful, looks into Eggleston’s life. My favorite part of the film is a segment where you get to see him framing and taking shots of a house on the side of the road, and then see the resulting prints of those shots. His pace is rapid and unpremeditated, the shots unstaged and lit with natural light, and he rarely takes a second shot. He speaks eloquently during the film about this; but then seems stubbornly unwilling to analyze his work and process in other contexts. The awards ceremony for the Hasselblad Prize is shown, and I couldn’t help but wonder whether he was drunk when receiving the award. I kept wanting to leap up and remind Eggleston and his drinking/drunken friends that they were being filmed — which is useless — and they seemed entirely comfortable showing what turns out to be a thoroughly alcohol soaked life to the camera. At the beginning of the film his hands tremble perceptibly while he is working, and it isn’t until later in the film that I connected this with his problems with alcohol. I’ve always regarded artistic work separate from the life of the artist, and think that the cult of personality thing is entirely out of hand. When I learn about an artist’s private life, it frequently negatively impacts my assessment of the work (e.g. Ayn Rand). In Eggleston’s case, this film starkly juxtaposes the ease of his work with the difficulties he apparently has navigating his daily life.
The architect we’ve been working with on plans for our dream house, Coleman Coker, gave us the book accompanying the Hasselblad Prize in 1998, which was probably my first in-depth exposure to Eggleston’s work. Thanks, Coleman.
The film itself was fascinating. Unfortunately, one of the short films before the main attraction had so much swirling and whirling imagery (trains, ferris wheels, camera whizzing in circles) that I actually got motion sickness from watching and had to turn away from any blurry, whirrying, rapidly cut images in the documentary itself, including some rare and early video work by Eggleston. I’m finding that my susceptibility to motion sickness is getting worse as I get older. It’s a mystery to me..
Thoughts In Random Patterns 