Just completed the documentary WILLIAM EGGLESTON IN THE REAL WORLD, a fascinating look at the straightforward snapshots of mundane suburbia. While there has been much criticism of Eggleston's "perfectly banal...perfectly boring" photographs - I find that their simplicity captures something much more.
The following is a commentary on Eggleston's work taken from the "The Tender-Cruel Camera"
by Thomas Weski -----
The use of the dye-transfer technique enables William Eggleston to add a psychological component to the atmosphere of his photographs. The American film theorist Stanley Cavell once remarked that the use of black-and-white material in photography and the cinema always emphasizes the finiteness of the action, that is to say, it points back to the past, whilst the use of color implies immediacy, even the possibility of a future. The psychology of perception which underlies Cavell's statement, namely his observation that the view can gain emotional access to a photograph through the color, is corroborated by the fact that many of Eggleston's photographs which are over thirty years old still look contemporary, they still seem to belong to the present day. Eggleston's use of color in his photographs is unspectacular, incidental. He uses it so subtly that we are no longer aware of it as a separate component of the process by which we perceive an object visually. 'What makes his photographs of nonevents especially meaningful is his use of color to convey the 'feel' of a particular place. He emphasizes hues that soak the scene or resonate in a critical way, virtually creating effects of sound, silence, smell, temperature, pressure--sensations that black-and-white photography has yet to evoke.'
Another reason for the shock which Eggleston's seemingly unspectacular photography caused was the fact that it was not accompanied by any commentary. 'Its subjects are, on the surface, the ordinary inhabitants and environs of suburban Memphis and Mississippi--friends, family, barbecues, back yards, a tricycle and the clutter of the mundane, for behind the images there is a sense of danger.' The choice of subject matter seemed to some critics to be totally indiscriminate, as though William Eggleston has applied no criteria at all. 'Eggleston's photographs often seem to have been taken not by a photographer but by a motorized camera swinging around the photographer's head on a string. Whatever happens to be in front of the lens when the shutter was tripped got photographed. Whatever was not, did not.' But even this negatively meant criticism reveals a further important aspect of Eggleston's work, namely his democratic approach to the subject matter. Eggleston speaks again and again of the 'democratic camera' which considers every object worthy of depiction. Naturally, this seemingly impersonal way of seeing things makes no distinction between 'beautiful' and 'ugly'. In other words, William Eggleston does not operate with the usual visual hierarchies, but rather accepts those motifs which illustrate his concept correctly.
Eggleston often photographs his subject matter from unusual angles. The photograph of the tricycle or the picture of the mysteriously red glowing toilet were taken from a prone position on the ground, thus reconstituting the still uninhibited field of vision of a child looking at an object which, at play, might easily take on any number of different meanings. The perspective of photograph conveys this sense of unrestricted freedom and transports us momentarily back into our childhood, though entirely without nostalgia. And it is precisely this lack of nostalgia, the cold and aloof way the artist treats his subject matter, that shocks us. It is as though we were looking at a psychogram of American everyday life, and of American middle-class society in particular. The interplay of color, form and content in Eggleston's photographs gives completely normal things or situations an additional level of meaning, turning them into visual metaphors of an alienated world. 'There was also something disturbing suggested by these images, something ominous. The empty shower brought to mind a torture chamber; a blood-red ceiling exploded like a violent hallucination; the open black oven could have been a suicide's last glimpse of the world.' In retrospect, William Eggleston's exhibition 'Color Photographs' at The Museum of Modern Art, and his accompanying publication represent nothing more and nothing less than a turning point in the history of photography. It was the point where color photography gained recognition as a medium of artistic expression.
