Word: eggleston
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Candid Camera. William Eggleston: Democratic Camera Photographs and Video, 1961-2008, photographer Eggleston's first retrospective, will be at New York City's Whitney Museum of American Art from Nov. 7 through Jan. 25. In his review, TIME's Richard Lacayo said the artist "reinvented the whole idea of what a picture was supposed to look like." (See William Eggleston's photos.) 945 Madison Avenue, at 75th Street, New York City...
...Eggleston also doesn't like the term snapshot aesthetic, but from early on, just like Garry Winogrand and Lee Friedlander, he's been making pictures that are brilliantly open to the flotsam of the visible world, the little accidents of vision and oddball details that snapshots automatically gather up. He is fascinated by American junk-space, the banal stretches of tract housing and strip malls. But there's nothing camp or ironic about Eggleston's work. The power of his pictures rests on their casual but absolute sincerity, their conviction that small is beautiful. There's something very American about...
Though he's widely traveled and keeps an apartment in Paris, Eggleston has worked mostly in the South. All the same, it makes him squirm to hear people describe him as a regional artist--Faulkner with a Leica. "I have never considered myself making what one would call Southern art," he says. "There is such a thing, but I don't do it." He insists he's not interested in local color, though there's no denying that it finds its way into a lot of his images. "The pictures look Southern because that's where they were taken...
...Eggleston has said he doesn't make a distinction between one image and another. So how does he choose which ones to publish or exhibit? "I don't," he says. And he means it. His working method is to take hundreds, even thousands of pictures--though rarely more than one shot of any particular scene--and let his curator or editors sort it out. For "William Eggleston's Guide," John Szarkowski, the legendary MOMA photo curator, effectively served a role like the one that editor Maxwell Perkins played for novelist Thomas Wolfe, drawing a meaningful work out of a superabundant...
...Eggleston isn't a religious man. "Oh, no, just the opposite," he says. "The idea of a soul to me is ridiculous." But there's a kind of spirituality in his pictures, an assent to things as they are and a conviction that the whole of creation is worth your careful attention. Look at his picture of a grocery boy pushing a rack of carts, or a hand stirring a drink on a flight, and you can't help realizing that, even in its most incidental corners, it's a bright, beckoning world out there. And that there's nothing...