Review: Eggleston at The Whitney

During the short but fulfilling holiday liaison, we at Creative Contact made an artistic pilgrimage of sorts, one that had us following the light that was, in this writers opinion, the most important exhibition of the year: William Eggleston at The Whitney Museum of American Art.

The photographer Frederick Sommer once said “Life itself is not the reality. We are the ones who put life into stones and pebbles,” and this statement has never rung so true as when you are face to face with one of Eggleston’s photographs. What to an amateur may seem like ordinary objects – subjects the eye may pass over but never examine – Eggleston creates epic narratives out of. The abandoned couch on the side of the road may appear to be nothing more than garbage, but through Eggleston’s lens this image has a history, one which lives have passed through never to return. This object has a soul, and it is this life-force that Eggleston brings to your attention.

He is well known as being the first critically successful fine art photographer to work in color, a mode which was, at the time, regulated to family vacation snap shots. This was a different quality of color, though, from what you might expect. Eggleston employed a dye-transfer printing process, one which even at the time was practically archaic, and used it to his advantage; his colors were bolder, brighter, and more intense.

Eggleston’s work, aesthetically, is easy to link to the snapshot aesthetic of Robert Frank and Garry Winogrand. These influences are there, clearly, in the framing of his photographs, seemingly shot from the hip and analyzed later in the process, but their major difference seem to be in favored subject matter; Frank and Winogrand, although they shot people as well static objects, produced better photographs of moving subjects (Frank’s images from Storylines or Winogrand’s New York photographs from the early 1960’s come to mind). Eggleston has produced beautifully evocative images of people, but his most successful images are the ones that feed into his natural detachment. His empty roads, broken down cars, and long forgotten landscapes could be more closely linked to a mode of surrealism; not one akin to psychology, but closer to Atget in Paris and Paul Martin in London, who were “looking for their unposed slice of life.”

The most impressive work at the exhibition, in part because I was largely unaware of them, was the work commissioned by Rolling Stone Magazine of Plains, Georgia, the hometown of Jimmy Carter on the eve of the 1976 presidential election. The assignment was to take photographs of the Carter family, but since Jimmy was campaigning, Eggleston decided that the fabric of the town was a more interesting subject anyway. As you look at these photographs, the narrative grows beyond the family, encompassing the past and present of a community, one that has previously been ignored but is on the verge of vast change due to their famous resident. It’s never made clear if the town wants this, or is even ready for it.

It’s almost a tragedy that it took this long for the extended art community to stage this type of retrospective for, in many minds, our greatest contemporary photographer. During a recent viewing of William Eggleston in the Real World, a 2005 documentary film by mediocre director Michael Almereyda, it became more clear to me how Eggleston produces the work he does: his eccentric, offbeat manner of life, down to his choices of clothing, appetite for drink and verbal gargling, is the ultimate Eggleston subject. He is one with his photographs.

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