Curated by Malia Schramm, the 35 prints from three private collections in “William Eggleston: Black and White to Color,” at Jackson Fine Art through Feb. 26, provide a unique glimpse into a 20-year span of the career of a photographer whose iconic color photography earned him a place in history when his 1976 solo show at the Museum of Modern Art confirmed color photography as an artistic medium.
One of the photographs, “Untitled (woman in yellow dress),” was originally made in 1973, the same year as Eggleston’s legendary “The Red Ceiling.” This 2007 print features similarly saturated color in the dye-transfer process that made that photograph groundbreaking in its use of a process previously reserved for commercial uses. But the awkwardly titled 1996 print “Untitled from Portfolio 10.D.70.V1 (trophies)” dates originally from 1968, and evinces a similar interest in unusual color and mundane subject matter.
Credit: Courtesy of Jackson Fine Art
Credit: Courtesy of Jackson Fine Art
The arcane descriptions reflect the complicated history of Eggleston’s career after attaining fame — complicated, that is, to anyone outside the world of portfolios and editions that is familiar territory to the collectors who acquired these prints. But the exhibition also includes a vintage print from the 1970s, “Untitled (Iceberg Café, Western U.S.),” that reflects the muted colors of less stable pigments.
There is also a unique 1974 “Double Self-Portrait with Marcia & Randall Drinking in a Photo Booth” that indicates the more humble background of at least some of the black and white photography from 1965-1974. It establishes an important context for Eggleston’s more famous work.
Such vintage prints as 1965′s “Untitled (dogs and cars)” and “Untitled (man in car)” already establish what Eggleston later called his “democratic” approach to images in which the overall composition mattered more than the individual object.
Some of the key images here date from the years of “The Democratic Forest,” a 1989 book gleaned from the thousands of images made in the 1980s that adhere to this aesthetic.
Credit: Courtesy of Jackson Fine Art
Credit: Courtesy of Jackson Fine Art
An afterword to that volume reveals Eggleston’s irritation with viewers who “even after the lessons of Winogrand and Friedlander . . . don’t get it . . . They want something obvious. I am at war with the obvious.” That last sentence is blazoned on the wall of the gallery as a confrontational maxim.
That is, however, one of the few concessions the show makes to larger photographic history. There is astounding attention paid to printing methods and provenance, as is only appropriate in an exhibition devoted to work from private collections. But viewers are left to discover for themselves the details of Eggleston’s devotion to what some historians are pleased to call a vision of America. Eggleston himself, in the aforementioned afterword, described some of the work as made “outdoors, nowhere, in nothing,” and featuring “just woods and dirt, a little asphalt here and there.”
One of these photographs of dirt is included in this exhibition, and yes, it reflects little of the documentary darkness of “the real America” discussed in Robert Johnston’s review of Eggleston’s 2002 London show. He perceived in Eggleston’s photographs “the seamy underbelly of America and the sordid detritus of human life,” if one counts cracked soil as sordid detritus.
On the other hand, there is considerably insightful surrealism of the everyday in the pair of 1984 photographs, “Untitled (World’s Fair under construction, New Orleans)” and “Untitled (from the Louisiana World Exposition, New Orleans).” Both are unconventional glimpses of the baroque excess of the last world’s fair to have been held thus far on American soil.
Credit: Courtesy of Jackson Fine Art
Credit: Courtesy of Jackson Fine Art
And the artfully framed clutter of “Untitled (shoe sale)” from the 1980s and the collapsed house wreckage in “Untitled (Memphis),” c. 1980, certainly count as detritus, though not necessarily “sordid.” The more decorous world captured in this exhibition demonstrates how complex William Eggleston’s life and body of work have been.
Combine reviews like the one of the Hayward Gallery show with Will Stephenson’s 2018 biographical essay in Oxford American, which covers the sensationalistic aspect alongside the professional career, and you will begin to have some idea of how Eggleston is viewed outside the world of the photographic community. But the existence of offices in Memphis for the William Eggleston Artistic Trust indicates how completely Eggleston has understood his place within that community and the collectors who find a place in its ecosystem.
The exhibition at Jackson Fine Art occurs within the context of that community, but it affords an entry point into a much broader understanding of what Eggleston is all about for those who already have some knowledge of his career. Even without it, the exhibit captures echoes of the qualities that made Eggleston seem so revolutionary when he burst on the scene more than 40 years ago.
Credit: ArtsATL
Credit: ArtsATL
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