 eggleston and you. Thursday, December 28, 2006 ...watched the documentary William Eggleston In The Real World the other night. If you are not familiar with Eggleston, here's my quick overview. A southern gent from the Mississippi Delta who wound up reinventing color photography. Not the process of color photography, mind you, but using color as an art form within the medium. Sometime around '67 Eggleston cornered MoMA's John Szarkowski in his office and handed him a briefcase of some 2,000 slides. Nine years later his one-man show of color photos (only the second ever at the museum) ushered in color photography's acceptance into the art world. More importantly Eggleston's work showed that images didn't have be about anything. Called banal, boring and even bad, by some critics, Eggleston's work has influenced everyone. Yes, everyone who every picked up their camera, pointed it at a cloud or a child's toy or a car tail light or their shoes. Eggleston made mundane...moving. As for the film, hmmm, if you are looking for real insight into Eggleston as photographer, this is not going to deliver for you. Eggleston stumbles around with Winston, his grown son, pointing his rangefinders at 'things,' and rarely talks above his Southern mumble (filmmaker and friend of Eggleston, Michael Almereyda, actually does us a great service by using subtitles for most of the film's dialogue). At a dilapidated roadhouse in Mayfield, Kentucky, a McDonald's parking lot and near an oversized chicken, Eggleston snaps. He says little about why, how or for what reason. Almereyda stalks him with a handheld camcorder, there is little soundtrack to speak of in most moments. Excitingly edited, voiced or executed this ain't...brilliant, for some reason, it is. I think I can safely say that photography is a part of Eggleston but definitely not all of him. An accomplished musician and composer, (his own music scores parts of the documentary) a decent pastel artist and a hard-drinking, chain-smoking grouch, also, he is. What we do learn is that Eggleston allows his work to speak for itself. As an artist he has little interest in his own past, instead he always believes the latest images to be his best. An amazing fact; he only shoots a single frame of any given 'shot.' When you consider that he states he has captured over 450,000 images in his lifetime, that is remarkable. The documentary touches on some of his Memphis past, but sadly gives little detail about his drinking, drugging and hanging with folks like Alex Chilton (Eggleston at one time used a studio behind Chilton's parent's home) and crazed iconic Memphis producer Jim Dickinson. The first photograph of Eggleston's most audiophiles ever saw was the classic The Red Ceiling, which adorned the sleeve of Big Star's Radio City album. On a re-released version of Big Star's Third/Sister Lovers album, you can hear Eggleston tapping piano as Chilton sings a geniusly damaged version of the Nat King Cole classic, 'Nature Boy'. Another Eggleston shot of dolls arranged on the hood of a Caddy appeared on Chilton's solo album, Like Flies on Sherbert. I would have loved to have heard more about these days but again, the film has little to do with Eggleston's past tales. We do see Eggleston's wife of many years as well as his 'girlfriend' Lucia Birch who died before the project was complete and who writhes upside down on her couch, sucking a lollipop while Eggleston mutters and sketches a nude of her (she is in seersucker PJs). Birch delivers a white-trash, soul-crushing, foreshadowing monologue about cancer that requires multiple viewings to truly appreciate. I am here to state that William (Bill) Eggleston should be credited as the first photoblogger. Albeit without the web or blog, his Memphis days with sunny suburban flair are definitely photographically logged, as it were, through the languid lens of this old master. His images deliver a personal nonchalance that as a habitual photoblog viewer, I cannot help draw the correlation between what he was doing and what many of us bloggers seek to do; to give a stylized self-portrait...without ever appearing in our captures. Are their great Eggleston images that we have never seen? Of course, but as he puts it so elequently... he has. The film takes its time, and at times seems pointless in scope, but in the end this pointlessness seems to deliver a better understanding of how Eggleston has found beauty, artistic merit and real meaning to the obviously familiar. Through puffs of smoke and the bottom of a bourbon glass we see Eggleston for who he is; a man who sometimes wields his camera to offer us what we already have but have failed to see the magic within. a door. Nikon FE2. FujiColor 100. Comment (9) | Permalink |
