Everybody wants to be william eggleston
Photo Credit - William Eggleston, Untitled, c. 1970-1973, Pigment print, Framed: 45 1/8 x 64 inches (114.6 x 162.6 cm), David Zwirner Gallery
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about William Eggleston and his photography. What it is, what it means, and why it’s so impactful. How can something that seems at face value so simple cause such a drastic shift in our perspectives of what makes a photograph? Why is it so good? So compelling? So unlike anything you’ve ever seen and at the same time so familiar it feels like you’ve seen it a million times? I have answers to these questions that are mostly about process and technique - dye transfer, Kodachrome, etc. I have ideas about nostalgia and consumerism, about the American South in the 1970’s. Hell, I even spent a week in Memphis interviewing Eggleston in 2013 when he was being sued by an outraged collector for creating a new edition of some of his most iconic work. But the question that still comes to me every time I’m presented with his work is, quite simply, how does he do it?
It’s a rare and beautiful thing to have a signature style. To have the creative capacity to produce something that people immediately recognize as “yours”. Eggleston was not the only person shooting color in a fine art context in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Joel Meyerowitz and William Christenberry were seeing the world in new ways, creating idiosyncratic images of Cape Cod and rural Alabama. But Eggleston’s images caught the zeitgeist, driving photography into unprecedented territory and never looking back.
Eggleston’s latest exhibition and book, “The Outlands” is a series of images shot between 1970 and 1973. It’s essentially a new edit of images pulled from the same source material that gave us the now legendary show at MoMA and blew the doors off the whole color-photography-as-fine-art debate. Eggleston gives us all hard lines and bright colors. Edward Hopper on steroids, or maybe a combination of whiskey and LSD. A visual feast of awkward angles and disturbing stillness. It’s captivating in the unbridled banality of everything. In Eggleston’s images, life is happening in the midst of the manufactured world, creeping along like molasses and bathed in magic hour sunlight and neon signs. Big blue skies are interrupted by the bulbs of a long-dead drive-in marquee, farm land is punctuated by road-side diners and banged up pick-up trucks. These images feel haphazard, but never unintentional.
Framing his photographic practice as inherently “democratic”, Eggleston believes photography is for everyone. It’s accessible in a way that other mediums are not and allows us a way of seeing the world and giving space and meaning to the people and places we interact with every day. That’s why we all feel like we can do it to, even though in reality, we can’t. But it doesn’t stop us from trying, and I think that’s what gives Eggleston’s work it’s staying power and relevance.
It’s almost cliche now to say that Eggleston’s work is a “examination of the ordinary,” because at it’s core it’s not. It’s extra-ordinary - the everyday on overdrive. It operates on some subliminal frequency based on color temperature and nostalgia, and it’s incredibly effective. I see things in real life now that look like William Eggleston photographs, not the other way around. What a wild way to look at the world.