Art

Untitled from "Los Alamos"

The show
“William Eggleston: Democratic Camera, Photographs and Video, 1961–2008,”
Whitney Museum of American Art, Nov 7–Jan 25

THE BACKGROUND
According to Elizabeth Sussman, the Sondra Gilman curator of photography at the Whitney, it was Eggleston’s upbringing in the old South that informs all of his work. His disdain for racism, his experience with the upheavals of the Civil Rights movement, gave him a kind of outsider’s point of view in his own region of the country. Being a Southerner only reinforced that perspective when his career took him to Harvard, where he taught for a while, and then to New York. Still, it is the uncanny framing of his pictures, their ability to seem both random and specific at the same time, that is the hallmark of Eggleston’s work, along with its almost psychedelic opticality.

THE SIGNIFICANCE
Eggleston’s lens transformed such quotidian moments as the pause of a woman’s hand stirring a drink next the window of a jetliner, or the profile of a young grocery clerk in the late afternoon bringing shopping carts back in from a supermarket parking lot. His subjects have included the less everyday as well, like his portfolio of Graceland in the 1980s (Memphis is Eggleston’s hometown). “There is an undercurrent of the most vague type of narrative in his work,” says Sussman. “He’s not trying to tell a story of his home and the New South, but nonetheless he has.”

THE TALENT
If Burckhardt’s approach touched upon painterly concerns, Eggleston moved them front and center with one seemingly simple yet all-encompassing act. “He’s generally credited with making color photography suitable for art photography,” says Sussman. “He was always interested in the latest technology and he liked the aesthetics of color slides.” Before Eggleston, art photography meant black and white; color film was more or less consigned to snapshots or magazines. That all changed when, in 1976, the Museum of Modern Art—where the photography department, run by legendary curator John Szarkowski, was considered the final arbiter of art photography—gave Eggleston a solo show. Of course, it wasn’t just the fact that Eggleston used color that made such an immediate impact; it was the way he used it. “It’s like he always says, that he wants to make the ‘ordinary extraordinary,’ ” comments Sussman. “And so, he often goes to things that are just completely ordinary, and he’s able to frame them in such a way that they become interesting.”

NEXT: A room of one’s own Not content with just a show at MoMA, Lucy McKenzie is redesigning the gallery space itself.»

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