William Eggleston (b.1939) was the first photographer whose work I fell in love with.
His sensibility is radically democratic. He takes pictures of the everyday people, places and things most of us take for granted. But the way he looks at his subjects – from strange angles, saturated with intense light and colour – gives them an iconic stature, investing them with mystery and grace. He is one of those artists who really can make you see the world differently, because his pictures reveal the magic and terror that's latent in the everyday, if only we look for it.
Eggleston is often called 'the father of colour photography', though he started out in black & white, influenced by Walker Evans and, especially, Henri Cartier-Bresson. You can still see traces of that influence in his work.
"His were the first pictures I'd seen which weren't just straight-on pictures like everybody else's," Eggleston has said. "He had angles like Degas or Toulouse-Lautrec – one picture after another. I think I understood Evans, but my real discovery was Cartier-Bresson."
Eggleston moved onto colour in the mid-1960s, making his breakthrough in 1973, when he discovered a dye transfer process that intensified his already saturated colours and his amazing eye for light. Everything in Eggleston's world glows, no matter how mundane it might be. Under his transformative light, everything is illuminated; everything matters.
To me, Eggleston's colours seem of their moment (post-Electric Kool Aid Acid Test) -- chemical both in their processing and in their response to hallucinogens in the cultural water. You talk about his influence on more recent photographers and filmmakers -- how do you see him connecting to the plugged-in, dropped-out 70s? And specifically to Americanness? That final image begs the question...
ReplyDeleteThat's very interesting indeed - thank you for the thoughts! For what it's worth, I do think Eggleston (and Shore and Goldin, for that matter) reflect the feel of their time and place with their colour palettes, as well as their subjects. However, Eggleston has also done work in Africa and Europe that feels very true to those environments - his photographs of London in the 1980s are particularly interesting, capturing the sense of physical transformation in the Thatcher era. Perhaps I'll do a post on them one day...
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