10th
William Eggleston: Democratic Camera, Photographs and Video, 1961-2008
With intense color and seemingly banal subject matter, the Whitney’s current restrospective on the work of William Eggleston serves as a foil to the Southern imagery depicted in HMA’s Road to Freedom collection.
Working in the Mississippi Delta, Eggleston was somewhat a pioneer in the realm of color photography. Thirty years ago photographs carried artistic merit if they were black and white. Color pictures were considered tacky and cheap, the stuff of cigarette ads and snapshot albums. However, we of course can retroactively view Eggleston’s work and know that it is not cheap; Eggleston adapted the dye transfer process used in advertising, which was the most expensive color process available at the time. Writes art critic Holland Cotter, “It produced hues of almost hallucinatory intensity, from a custard-yellow sunset glow slanting across a wall to high-noon whiteness bleaching a landscape to pink lamplight suffusing a room.”
Perhaps most evident in Eggleston’s work is its striking contrast to contemporary images of the South, which often depict extreme racial tensions and turmoil in historical significant accounts of the civil rights movement. In comparison, Eggleston’s subjects appear to be nobodies and nothing: a girl reclining on a lawn, a rural sign, an abandoned tricycle. But upon second look these deceptively bland images reveal grandeur through Eggleston’s mastery of composition: the girl is a sleeping giant as her body dominates the frame, the sign stretches across an artificial horizon created by a sloping sheet metal roof, and the tricycle appears to be colossal as it is shot from a supine vantage point.
Effectively, it is Eggleston’s treatment of these mundane images from Southern life evokes feelings that are all at the same time indifferent, nostalgic, and reverent; making Democratic Camera a show that will surely resonate with those of us who harbor conflicting sentiments of growing up in the South.
“William Eggleston: Democratic Camera, Photographs and Video, 1961-2008” continues through Jan. 25 at the Whitney Museum of American Art; (212) 570-3600, whitney.org.
