How William Eggleston Changed the Way We See the World

The photographer William Eggleston first radicalized the art world 40 years ago with his colorful, dye-transfer prints; the same year he had undertaken a portfolio titled “Election Eve,” a road trip from his home in Memphis, Tennessee, to Jimmy Carter’s hometown of Plains, Georgia. He avoided, to paraphrase his famous quote, the obvious, and veered off the campaign trail, with its barber shops and town halls and babies to be kissed; instead he photographed emptied yards, sides of barns, churches with hand-painted names in crooked lettering, weeds poking through red Georgia clay, a Jimmy Carter for President sticker plastered to the bumper of a brown Chrysler in a rain-puddled parking lot. His pictures did not require human beings. I first saw some of the images that make up “Election Eve” around the time of Bush vs. Gore, and I have not trusted a poll since. The real signs, as they do with much of Eggleston’s work, lie in the landscape.

I went to meet him a week before the presidential eleciton. In a room at the Bowery Hotel he sat in a loveseat and asked, in his low-register, if I would sit by him. His daughter, Andra, who designs textiles based on her father’s drawings, would soon join us. His Leica rested on a coffee table, next to a glass of water and an ashtray. CNN played on the television, but nobody in the room paid any attention to it, least of all Eggleston, who has steadfastly expressed disinterest in politics for as long as he has been giving interviews.

He wore a suit and an ascot tie, half undone, presumably for no particular reason other than the fact that he nearly always wears one. He claims to have never owned a pair of jeans. He was jacket-less, perfectly tailored, shoes shined. It was just the way he was dressed eight years ago in Memphis, when I first met him before his major retrospective at the Whitney Museum, and it was the way he had been dressed the previous evening at an Aperture Foundation gala, “Dear Bill,” at which he was the guest of honor. He had not, I had noticed, stuck around long enough to hear, “Nature Boy,” a song which was sung as a tribute to him. It was perfectly all right, we decided, that he had cut out a little early; after all, he had quite a lot going that week in New York, and for a good while to come. This was the eve, too, of Eggleston’s exhibition, “The Democratic Forest,” at the David Zwirner gallery, which began representing him late last year. The show featured a selection of new photographs from his epic series of some 1,500 photographs made between 1983 and 1986. In the ’80s, Eggleston described the project this way: “Friends would ask what I was doing and I would tell them that I was working on a project with several thousand prints. They would laugh but I would be dead serious. At least I had found a friend in that title, The Democratic Forest, that would look over me.”

Democratic, referring not to the Party, but to an equanimity of subject. If his 1976 Museum of Modern Art debut legitimized color photography as art (much to the initial scorn of the New York art world), the shelter of the title “Democratic Forest” gave him permission to go everywhere, beginning with the cotton fields of his native Mississippi and prowling the back lots and side roads and lost corners of the American South, Pittsburgh, Berlin, and elsewhere. In his hands, the camera becomes a palpable, itinerant presence; the scope feels restless, filmic. Nothing was off limits, and nothing mattered more than anything else. The image of a child’s face—even the face of his own child—carried no more photographic weight than a rusted car door. That car door could be freighted with just as much feeling as one of the luminous large-format portraits: artistically, Eggleston approached and treated them the same. His places and objects are attitudinally akin to a Cézanne still life, and frequently more autobiographically revelatory than his people. Place is central to Eggleston, and no junkyard, no field, no food stand, no porch, no laundry room can be viewed as insignificant.

Last fall’s “The Democratic Forest” exhibit was accompanied by a new edition of his book of the same name, and it was preceded in late 2015 by Steidl’s publication of a monumental 10-volume set of the series, and it came on the heels of “William Eggleston: Portraits,” at the National Gallery in London, which travels to Australia next month, accompanied by a new catalogue. Another exhibition, “Los Alamos,” opens at Foam in Amsterdam in March. As sprawling as “The Democratic Forest,” it is made up of works shot on subsequent travels throughout the American South and West, including, as its title indicates, the town in New Mexico where the nuclear bomb was developed in secret.

If this sounds like an awful lot of Eggleston pictures resurfacing in the world again, well, it is. It’s difficult, at least in my own world, to find someone who has never seen them before. Say his name and the person you are with will no doubt cycle through a mental sequence of now-iconic shots: a bag boy pushing a grocery cart through a magic hour-lit parking lot; a tricycle, shot at street curb level so it assumed a presence as stately and grand as a Cadillac; the blood red ceiling on the cover of your Big Star album; two girls lounging on a flowered green sofa like a Renoir painting. And so on.

But to look at his photographs again, especially now, and even the ones you think you know well, is to induce a fresh vision. You stop being able to see the world the way you once did; you start seeing Egglestons everywhere. In her introduction to the original edition of The Democratic Forest, Eggleston’s dear friend Eudora Welty wrote what remains the wisest and most astute thing that has ever been written about his work. This was in 1989, and rings louder now still:

"Our own way of seeing may have recently been in trouble. These days, not only the world that we look out upon but the human eye itself seems at times occluded, as if a cataract had thickened over it from within. We have become used to what we live with, calloused (perhaps in self-protection) to what’s happened outside our door, and we now accept its worsening. But Eggleston’s vision of the world is clear, and clarifying to our own."

At the hotel, Eggleston and I looked through some of his photographs together. “That looks like New Orleans,” he said, at a picture in which only parts of street corners or houses were visible. It was architectural, he suggested, but it was something else too. I reminded him that the last time we met, he told me that when he gets his printer’s proofs, he first looks at them upside down. “This is true,” he said now in his sage, laconic way. “You see things in there that you wouldn’t normally see.” We examined a photograph of an auto shop and car wash (“a very complicated composition,” he declared), turning it this way and that. Electric wires and poles bisect the frame; arrows point to its outer edges; signs jut into cars into asphalt, directing attention everywhere.

Elsewhere in the room, his friend the artist Leanna Hicks sat on a bed, crouched over a little black book, in which she was painting fantastical, saturated scenes in acrylic and enamels, scenes with titles like Matilda Waiting in Hell and Lucinda in the Apex. She was introduced to Eggleston several years ago through a mutual friend. “I didn’t know his photographs then,” she told me. She had just moved to Memphis from Louisiana. “When I walked in the door, I was like, who are you? And he was like, who are you?” She laughed. “I like people who are a challenge,” she said. “I like people who are hard to get to. I like people who are cold on the outside, ’cause that means they got the good shit on the inside.”

“Coming where I come from, I don’t think anybody’s a big deal,” Hicks continued. “But now he’s one of my best friends. He’s unapologetic. You know, the minute you submit your will to somebody else’s opinion, a piece of you dies. You got to believe in yourself wholeheartedly. Some people might interpret that as ruthless but I think that’s living a good life.”

Living a good life is central to understanding Eggleston, whose patience for convention and dull moments is slim, and who has as strong an appetite for the company of women as he does for an eccentric, fun-loving crowd of associates (see his film Stranded in Canton). He managed to layer that life onto the one he lived with his wife of 50 years, the beautiful, forceful, and literary-minded Rosa Dossett Eggleston, with whom he had three children; she died in the summer of 2015. “I miss her very much,” Eggleston told me. Though they were based mostly in Memphis, Eggleston willfully rejects the tag “Southern photographer”; he once told a reporter he prefers “citizen of the world.”

And, well, why not. While he is so essentially Memphian that he was invited by Priscilla Presley to freely wander and photograph Elvis’s Graceland after-hours, Eggleston has also lived often in Paris, the city of his great hero Henri Cartier-Bresson, where he has had commissions from the Fondation Cartier, and posed for Marc Jacobs with Charlotte Rampling (his friend Juergen Teller photographed it); in New York, where he lived for a time in the Chelsea Hotel with his friend Viva, and where his circle included Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander, and his curator John Szarkowski; in the New Orleans and Delta late nights of Canton. When he was commissioned to photograph his friends Gus van Sant and David Byrne’s movies, he went off and made pictures of the world of the films instead (“Sets are boring,” he declared). He is a fine piano player who began playing when he was four—“like Mozart!” he told me. His favorite composer is Bach.

“I truly believe that if you look at his drawings and listen to the music my father listens to, you will gain a better understanding of him as an artist,” Andra Eggleston told me that afternoon. She wore a bright Agnés B. dress made from one of her Electra Eggleston patterns based on one of her father’s drawings, and a new pair of Christian Louboutin stiletto boots. Her brother, William III, edited the recent volumes of The Democratic Forest; together he and her brother Winston direct the archives of the Eggleston Trust. Andra says she never really connected with her father’s photographs. She gravitated instead, she said, to his piano playing, and to the vivid, abstract drawings he has made for years, often with Sharpie, and frequently on hotel stationery. Recently she had a memory of how her father used to retrieve the patterns that, as a child, she would draw as a child and toss in the wastebasket; in the morning she’d discover them pinned up on the wall. A few years ago, she began salvaging her father’s sketches and turning them into textile patterns.

The room was chilly; she pointed to a black overcoat thrown over a chair.

“Is that yours, Dad?”

“It’s old Gaultier,” Eggleston said. “Paris!” Andra wrapped it around her shoulders.

“I think my greatest experience in watching my dad photograph was being witness to the way he saw things,” Andra said. “I used to watch him study things—something so ordinary and so seemingly simple. Like there would be a set of glasses that had no monetary value and he would zoom in those glasses and study them, visually, for sometimes days. And that was the object of his intention. And it drove my mother crazy! But that I think was the greatest gift my dad has given me, to be able to see that.”

I was curious about when, growing up, that it had become apparent to her that her father was an artist.

“It was sort of difficult and scary for me to understand what he was and who he was,” Andra said. “There was a lot of drama growing up. It was certainly quite unconventional. It just comes with the territory. You know, he doesn’t exactly photograph the wilderness”— Hicks, who was still painting in her sketchbook, laughed loudly at this, and so did Andra—“I mean he wasn’t just peeking in on the situation, he was living that situation. It took me a long time to understand. And that was all definitely around.”

“Like the brick?” I asked. In a segment on CBS Sunday Morning, she had described a brick being thrown through the window of their family home, ostensibly by one of her father’s girlfriends.

“Oh yes,” Eggleston said in an offhand way.

“You know,” Andra said, “there’s another part of that story, which is that one night my mom got really pissed off and decided she was going to dress up like my dad and go over to his girlfriend’s house with a brick; she was clearly inspired by the brick-through-the-window incident.”

“Now that I don’t recall,” Eggleston said.

“Winston told me the other night! He said he clearly remembered her putting on khaki pants and a white-button down shirt and she was all revved up to go over to her house and throw a brick. I don’t know that she actually went over there and did it, but it was more the magic of thinking about that.” I had seen Rosa in Eggleston’s photographs, in Michael Almereyda’s documentary, William Eggleston in the Real World, and heard some of the family stories, and it was enough to make me wish aloud that I’d had the chance to meet her. “I wish you had too,” Eggleston said, with extra gravity. “She had an incredible eye. She always knew if a photograph of mine was good or not. She was always right. It was”—he paused—“inescapable not to notice how correct she always was.”

What may very well come off to some as indifference—considering a person or a crack in the sidewalk as photographic equals—is actually a more enlightened sort of vision. In its own way, it is the noblest political act for a man who claims to exist outside of politics: What he has perfected in his photographs is a way of seeing without judgment. Now it struck me that his way of looking is the visual equivalent of deep, intent listening.

“Do you still play piano every day?” I asked him.

“Yes,” he answered, “and into the night.”

“Do you record it? Do people record you?”

“No,” he said. “It’s a lot of trouble to set it up. I live in an apartment building that was once a hotel. Rosa and I started living there the day after we were married. Didn’t have any children, didn’t need a house. We spent a lot of time growing up with my parents outside in the country, which means a cotton plantation. I held onto the apartment all these years. I just go in and instantly start playing. I listen very intently to what’s coming out of the piano.”

What had spoken to him, early on, I wondered, when he first heard Bach.

“I think the best word is abstract,” Eggleston said. “Bach was not trying to tell a story with his music. And that’s attractive to me. I don’t know why.”

There’s a kind of freedom in that, I suggested. In not being able to pin something down or explain it.

“Mm-hmm,” he said.

“That’s the way I feel about your drawings,” I said. “With a photograph of a supposedly real thing, people feel more equipped say it means this or it means this.”

“When, actually, it’s often quite abstract,” Eggleston said. “As you notice when you look at them upside down.”

“Like the way you can see just a fragment of a side of a building in your picture and know it’s in New Orleans. To even say exactly why that is, is hard to describe.”

“Yes, that’s absolutely true,” Eggleston allowed.

I turned to Andra. “And growing up, he played for you?” I asked.

She nodded, her father’s coat still wrapped around her shoulders. “Oh, all the time. He didn’t know he was playing for me, but he was. He still is.”

Author: Rebecca Bengal

Source: Vogue