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William Eggleston at Cheim & Read
Art in America, June-July, 2004 by Edward Leffingwell
William Eggleston, the photographer most associated with the introduction of commercially processed color prints to contemporary art photography, was born in Memphis in 1939 and began to shoot in color in 1965. Moving for a time to New York City, he presented his revolutionary product in the form of color slides to John Szarkowski, then curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art. The landmark exhibition of dye-transfer prints from a pictorial essay that Eggleston concluded in 1971 appeared at the museum several years later.
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Set forth as evidence of Eggleston before color and how he got there, this gallery exhibition, "Precolor: The Black and White Pictures 1959-1974," consisted of 69 unretouched, vintage black-and-white prints not previously exhibited or even known. Like his work in color, they consist of fully composed records of a vernacular landscape, inflected with private moments shared by strangers in a pictorial diary of a vanished American South.
This surprising exhibition consisted of prints that for the most part claim the pictorial affect associated with the gritty side of photojournalism. The laconic images describe solitary figures, trucks, cars, parking lots and highways, lunch counters, fast-food restaurants, waiting rooms and hotel rooms, only obliquely acknowledging the cultural upheaval of the civil rights movement and the Americanization of the war in Vietnam at the time of their making. Often composed of intersecting planes anchored by a central figure or object, they describe in what ways Eggleston's method of composing and shooting developed before he turned his hand to color.
Apparently printed full-frame, these images range from an intimate 5 by 7 inches to as large as 16 by 20 inches. Many of the latter size--a young man in military uniform in a waiting room, an empty office, the interior of a convenience store--are suffused with grain, the result of enlargement and the high-speed film associated with the rapidity and informal circumstances of their taking. The later portrait images of various young people shot in Memphis in 1973-74 used slower film. Beatific in a 20-by-16-inch print, a damaged, would-be poet affects a prayerful pose--and then comes to life at disturbing length in the projected video Stranded in Canton (1974). The video is a shocking 30 minutes of low-down, roadhouse black-and-white footage, in which Eggleston's subject relieves himself in some godforsaken nighttime parking lot, then feigns sexual abandon with the neck of a beer bottle. The mournful longhair invokes a Canton of the mind. "Are you ready to lose your soul in Canton?" he cries into the night and to Eggleston and his Sony Porta-pak, as though this doomed prophet has at last found a witness who is unflinchingly there.
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