Since my arrival in Houston in September, one artist has more influenced my thinking than any other—William Eggleston. I have encountered his work several times this year, and each time its importance multiplies. Eggleston's photographs tell you something about Texas that you just can't understand until you have lived here awhile. I can only describe this something as the way that time seems to lingers here, ceasing almost to move forward until it lapses itself.
This passage of time is told through Eggleston's photographs individually and in series. Much of Eggleston's entire body of work is currently on display at the Art Institute of Chicago in the exhibition, The Democratic Camera, Photographs and Video, 1961-2008 (until May 23rd). Although Eggleston's printing techniques have changed from dye-transfer to digital and the scale of his photographs has shifted from 8 x 10 inches to 20 x 30 inches, his subject matter and his approach to it remain unchanged. Eggleston articulates this approach in an interview from 1988, as he describes driving through Mississippi, pulling over, getting out of his car with his camera and looking out at a dried up field. Even though, as he says, "it was one of those occasions when there was no picture there," he made one anyway. Eggleston describes this decision as a choice to photograph "democratically."
In this interview and in the series The Democratic Forest, Eggleston confronts one of the oddest experiences in photography—that moment when you look around and find nothing visually compelling enough to photograph, but you make an image anyway. This moment is uncomfortable, even depressing, as you stand bluntly looking out at a space where absolutely nothing lends itself to becoming an image. There is something strangely subversive about making a picture of "nothing," of "no place," or of that which is non-descript to the point of failing to cohere into an image. In photographing "democratically," Eggleston's images run counter to the idea that a photograph should narrate an event; nonetheless, Eggleston's images also avoid becoming sublime images of nothing. These are not spectacular images of voids, as many recent photographers like Trevor Paglen and Hiroshi Sugimoto have delved into. Eggleston's "democratic" approach to photography leads to images of "nothing" that are often boring and mundane, but for this reason they are remarkably, and also uncomfortably, familiar.
One could argue that Eggleston's consistent approach to the same subject matter appears staid over time, yet through this process Eggleston reveals what has remained the same in the Southern United States since the 1960s: beneath the ordinariness of daily life and cleanliness of domestic spaces lies a sense of uncertainty about the future. Singularly his sparse compositions appear easy to read, but upon viewing the images as a series you begin to realize that this simplicity belies confusion. This tension is heightened when Eggleston photographs the space around whatever should be at the center of the scene. The center could be the owner of the home in Greenville, Mississippi who never appears in the photograph that Eggleston took there on a sunny afternoon; all we see is an empty seat on the sofa beside a window. Without this center, Eggleston's image instead becomes a document of all of the forces that shape our identity as individuals and as a nation.
From this image of a quiet parlor in Mississippi are hurtled questions about how we define prosperity, happiness, safety and convenience. Above all, once we have settled upon these definitions we must then ask, what of this is sustainable? Despite the urgency of these questions, the viewer never feels as if they are looking at the crux of the problem, but somehow seeing it from the side, which makes it more approachable. Eggleston's approach, oddly enough, reminds me of Kara Walker's decision to use silhouettes as a way of allowing her and her audience to confront fantasies of race and gender that would otherwise be too "ugly" to depict (this is her word, from the Art:21 interview, "Insurrection!" from 2003). While Eggleston certainly is not as critical in his work of the fantasies of race and gender that Walker seeks to expose in her silhouettes, he does, to an extent, allow us to confront our own expectations about life in America by showing us the periphery rather than the center.
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