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William Eggleston | page 1, 2

While he was still in the grip of the Cartier-Bresson obsession, Eggleston moved to Memphis, but it proved a dead end from which escape was vital. "There came a point -- must've had to do with pulling up roots and coming to Memphis -- I had to face the fact that what I had to do was go out into foreign landscapes," Eggleston said. "What was new back then was shopping centers, and I took pictures of them."

I remember being amazed at that first color work. I had never seen anything like it; no one had. The first private, so to speak, color photography that was equal in technical quality to advertising photographs, it was truly subversive, lavishing the kind of attention on everyday reality that had been reserved for selling products. Eggleston recalls:

What I set out to do was produce some color pictures that were completely satisfying, that had everything, starting with composition. My first tries were ridiculous. I got some snapshots back and I hadn't exposed them properly; they were awful. I threw them away. Composition was probably correct, but it was lost in the ... dismal technical failure.

I'd assumed I could do in color what I could do in black and white, and I got a swift, harsh lesson. All bones bared. But it had to be. Then one night I stayed up figuring out what I was gonna do the next day, which was go to Montesi's, the big supermarket on Madison Avenue in Memphis. It seemed a good place to try things out. I had this new exposure system in mind, of overexposing the film so all the colors would be there. And by God, it all worked. Just overnight. The first frame, I remember, was a guy pushing grocery carts. Some kind of pimply, freckle-faced guy in the late sunlight. Pretty fine picture, actually.

It has by now become evident, perhaps even to Hilton Kramer, that an essential point of Eggleston's work is his determinedly anti-heroic subject matter. He has said that he believes it's possible to photograph anything, anywhere. ("A long time ago I didn't," he recalls. "I thought you had to go to Paris.") Because of the protean nature of photography and its many uses, critics and non-critics have trouble seeing photographs for what they are rather than for what's in them. Sublime photojournalists such as Robert Capa and Susan Meiselas have created powerful images of compelling subjects, but this is far from what Eggleston does. His work starts from the premise that it's about more than its subject matter. "It's the photography that's important," he has said.

Click to display a gallery of William Eggleston's photographs in a new browser window Discover more about William Eggleston at BARNES & NOBLE

For nearly 40 years, Eggleston has been married to Mississippi princess Rosa Dosset. As teenagers they roamed the Delta in matching baby-blue Cadillacs. They have two sons, William and Winston, and a daughter, Andra. The sons are world-class loudspeaker designers. If you're into musical perfection and can stand the heat, they'll sell you a pair of speakers for a hundred grand. (Their economy speaker, the Andra model, will set you back $15,000.) Little Bill told Stereophile magazine, which named the more expensive speakers its product of the year for 1997, "My dad always told me that when he started, the only way you could get really good speakers was to build them yourself," adding, "It seemed like there was always a war between having a pile of equipment in the living room and having a neat, normal room."

When I first knew Eggleston, one occasionally heard the word "dilettante" used to describe him, simply because one man isn't supposed to know about music, firearms, sound systems, television set construction and art. Eggleston's strict low-key aesthetic kept him from becoming a household name overnight. Seekers of romance can find it in his work, but only with an investment of effort that such seekers, whether housewives or New York Times critics, are rarely willing to make. Though he did not slacken his progress in amassing a great body of work -- thousands of exposures -- Eggleston did not publish another book of photographs until "The Democratic Forest" in 1989. He had by that time photographed extensively in the American West, Kenya, Egypt, Georgia, Louisiana, England, Germany and Austria. He had also completed a commission to photograph Graceland, Elvis Presley's monument to bad taste. Though Eggleston and Presley came from opposite ends of the social spectrum, there was a certain poetic justice in the choice of Eggleston as the one to preserve Presley's milieu. After becoming a successful entertainer, Presley never wore blue jeans. Eggleston has never owned a pair in his life. The significance of wearing what are essentially work clothes was lost on neither man.

Eggleston has been characterized, justly, as willful. Seldom has there been a greater individualist than Eggleston, a man who prides himself on never having done a push-up. (For a former military school inmate, this is indeed an accomplishment.) His iron determination and discipline are perhaps most clearly revealed in his work method, which consists of taking one shot of an image. That is, contrary to what they tell you in photography class, Eggleston doesn't bracket exposures, he doesn't try first one angle and then another; he sees a composition and captures it once and for all time.

True, his photographs, as Eudora Welty acknowledged in her introduction to "The Democratic Forest," "focus on the mundane world. But," she hastens to add, "no subject is fuller of implications than the mundane world!"

Eggleston's next book, "Faulkner's Mississippi," published in 1990, contained an extensive text by Willie Morris, another native of the state. It was a ménage à trois made in heaven, or someplace rather dissimilar from Mississippi. Morris' prose is excellent, filled with understanding and empathy, but Eggleston's photographs, so unlike much of Faulkner's work in their impeccable clarity, overpower the project and make it ultimately one more great Eggleston album.

In 1959 the master photographer Walker Evans called color photography vulgar -- not meaning it as a compliment -- but that was before he fell in love with William Christenberry's Brownie pictures and the products of his own Polaroid SX-70. In the '70s, Szarkowski said that Eggleston was inventing color photography, and it seems he was right. Many photographers have followed his lead, but no one has been able to do what he does. His influence in that sense might be compared to Hemingway's: He changed everything, but nobody can really emulate him. His subject matter is too unpredictable, his compositional sense too unerring.

The most extensive view of Eggleston's work published to date is "Ancient and Modern," released to coincide with a 1992 exhibition at the Barbican Art Gallery in London. It includes black-and-white images from the early and middle '60s as well as color work from around the world. The exhibition traveled to Denmark, Germany and Switzerland. He has since had many exhibitions in the United States and in other countries such as Japan and Austria. In March of this year he went to Goteberg, Sweden, to accept the Erna and Victor Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography. At the same time there was an exhibition at the Hasselblad Center in the Goteberg Museum of Art. Scalo publishers issued a book, "William Eggleston," to commemorate the event. In its foreword, Gunilla Knape, director of the Hasselblad Center, writes, "Eggleston introduced a new aesthetic, a new 'democratic' way of seeing through which the ordinary and banal became extraordinary and engrossing."

The banal, then, is still banal, but now it's engrossing. I suppose this must be seen as progress, but Eggleston's belief has been and remains that what the resolutely high-minded call banality is the stuff of life itself. It is where we live -- but not only there. Much has been made of Eggleston's oft-quoted statement "I am at war with the obvious." Here he is, not atypically, saying a good deal less than he means. Eggleston loves the obvious -- he hates, and is indeed at war with, the idea of it, the contempt in which it is held. He sees what's in the gutter but also looks up to the heavens. As Malcolm Jones, an unusually perceptive critic of Eggleston's work, has observed, "He addresses the meanest objects with unstuttering love."
salon.com | Sept. 7, 1999

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