The Laconic Egalitarian (with a camera at least)

For as long as I've been making photographs I've shot mostly in color; I don't think I shot a roll of black and white film until I was in college and after my requisite black and white courses I was back to color. Specifically I was working with the dye transfer process. I loved the lusciousness of the prints and how I could manipulate colors, the pureness of the colors themselves and how flexible it was. Because I was not studying art or photography at the time I took great liberties when preparing my separations and was not following the rules of the process as closely as I should have been. As a result my images were very hyper-hued and "unnatural"- just the way I liked it. My dye transfer days didn't last long; I was in college and couldn't afford the film and chemistry and refocused my studies back to architecture (which also didn't last long). All the while I remember wondering if anyone used the process for "real" work. Of course someone already was: William Eggleston.

I was given a copy of  William Eggleston's Guide and was instantly hooked to the imagery: the openess of the compositions, the sheer weight of the everyday, the attention to the mundane and of course the COLOR.  Eggleston's embrace of color in all of its natural and artificial forms is his trademark and has made him a powerful force in photography for over 30 years. His influence can be felt (both directly and tangentially) in film, art, photography and advertising. His deceptively casual "eye" can be seen in the photographic works of Philip Lorca Di Corcia, Catherine Opie, Katy Grannan, and countless others.  Contemporary filmmakers like Gus Van Sant, Sofia Coppola and Wes Anderson certainly owe a debt of creative gratitude to Eggleston as well. Now, after 32 years since his one and only major American exhibit, Eggleston is being formally (re)introduced to the art world in an expansive exhibit at the Whitney: William Eggleston: Democratic Camera—Photographs and Video, 1961-2008. The exhibit features over 150 works  of photography and video executed in both color and black and white. It has received accolades from all circles of fashion, culture, art and beyond; I'm sure it will be extremely successful when it starts touring later in 2009. Everyone should check it out. Really, if the show comes to your neighborhood, run, don't walk to be first in line. 

When you do see the show, try to look beyond the images themselves and consider this: William Egglseston DOES NOT, HAS NOT and NEVER will shoot snapshots. Eggleston has never championed a "snapshot" aesthetic and in afterword of The Democratic Forest he writes: 

I am afraid that there are more people than I can imagine who can go no further than appreciating a picture that is a rectangle with an object in the middle of it, which they can identify. They don't care what is around the object as long as nothing interferes with the object itself, right in the centre. Even after the lessons of Winogrand and Friedlander, they don't get it… (t)hey want something obvious. The blindness is apparent when someone lets slip the word 'snapshot'. Ignorance can always be covered by 'snapshot'. The word has never had any meaning. I am at war with the obvious.

Eggleston has always been about the quest for the sublime in the everyday and finding perfection in the commonplace. He is not looking for the truth in his images - that would be an inefficient waste of energy. Instead, Eggleston is sharing with us his bookmarks and souvenirs from his travels and experiences. Which like any collection, is carefully cataloged and considered before acquiring. There are no accidents, no snapshots, no regrets. There is only a deliberate, methodical way of seeing and photographing only the essentials; that is, everything.

William Eggleston: Democratic Camera—Photographs and Video, 1961-2008 is at the Whitney Museum of American Art until January 25, 2009.

It then travels to these fine places:

Haus der Kunst, Munich

February 20-May 17, 2009

Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.

June-September 2009

Art Institute of Chicago

February 20-May 16, 2010

Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles

November-January 2011