EGGLESTON'S "DEMOCRATIC CAMERA"

Museums are a little like my apartment. Funded mainly by donations, they lack good furniture and are filled with out-of-town guests, security guards and tons of unread books by the door. But they have better stuff on the walls.

It was in the interest of looking at better stuff that I ventured across town to the Whitney Museum of American Art for their show of photographs by William Eggleston, a legendary American photographer. (The show closed on January 25th, but will now travel on to the Haus der Kunst in Munich.)

Music buffs know Eggleston’s photos as the album covers of Big Star’s excellent “Radio City” and Alex Chilton’s not-so-excellent “Like Flies on Sherbert”, among others. But for the less hip, an exhibition of his work delivers a where-have-you-been-all-my-life experience. (That he isn't more well known is partly his own fault, as he hasn’t widely licensed his photos for mass consumption. Prepare to be crestfallen by the lack of posters.)

A mystique of unavailability has added to the aura of Eggleston’s work. But this is ironic given the criticism he earned for his “democratic camera” after his first show at the MoMA in 1976. At a time when colour film was thought good for only snapshots and vacation slides, Eggleston used a commercial dye-transfer that made his hues blaze and pop like they do in advertisements. Critics complained that the photographs were ordinary, his subjects common.

Eggleston captured his iconic images of Americana just as Pop artists were skewering the same day-glow, postwar promises in New York. But Eggleston's work is filled with sympathy for what he documents. His photos capture loneliness, decay and prosaic stillness with an understatement that could easily feel too affected or intentional in less capable hands. He's more Hopper than Warhol.

These photos are often wryly funny and teasingly suggestive. (American Apparel’s wood-panelled trailer-bait ads owe no small debt to Eggleston.) And his subjects seem to speak for themselves, such as a boy in overalls with neatly parted hair who intently reads a gun magazine, or a woman whose beehive hairdo resembles stately Roman architecture. Often I couldn't help but giggle.

His pictures may be worth thousands of words, but the man himself is one of few. When a friend of mine had the chance to meet his reticent hero, he asked, “What do you think of New York?” After a long Egglestonian pause, he replied, “Well, it’s on the map.” Other questions yielded a similar drought. More revealing, though, was when he turned to my friend’s mother and said, in his deep Southern drawl, “Madam, you…are…lovely.”

~ DANIEL ARIZONA

"God Damn That's A Good Looking Blue": Winston Eggleston on William Eggleston

Film and interview directed by: Douglas Sloan
Courtesy: Icontent Films and Intelligent Content.com