A Modest Correction (with Addendum)

I am a huge William Eggleston fan.  From all I've seen of his work and read of his approach to photography, he is a kindred spirit.  And a distant mentor to this self-taught amateur.  I can't wait until the crowds die down so I can see his Whitney retrospective, which opened friday.

This is one of my favorite Egglestons:

But one thing that's constantly repeated about Eggleston, and in particular about his 1976 solo exhibition at MoMA, just annoys me: that it was that Eggleston exhibit -- and its imprimatur by curator extraordinaire John Szarkowski -- that finally brought respectability to color photography and its acceptance in "serious art photography" (which is now, of course, almost entirely in color). I've seen this tidy bit repeated in nearly every review of the current Whitney show I've read so far -- including Holland Cotter's in the NYTimes and Richard Lacayo's in Time Magazine.  (Hints of the same in Rebecca Bengal's review in New York Magazine, and Julie Belcove's in W Magazine.)

It's a nice story, except that it's basically bogus.  Another example of the mainstream media / art public's dumbing down (or cleaning up) of the messiness that is photography's history. 

Where does one start in exploding this myth? How about Helen Levitt's work in "Slide Show," from the late 50s through the early 70s? I believe that Szarkowski showed "Slide Show" at MoMA in 1972 or 1973. Or Saul Leiter's gorgeous color work from the late 1950s? Or Stephen Shore's stuff from the early 1970s? And didn't the two Joels -- Meyerowitz & Sternfeld -- also do "serious" color work before 1976? And why don't Walker Evans's SX70 polaroids from the early 70s count as "respectable art photography in color"? Going back even further, shouldn't one count Paul Outerbridge's very early color stuff from the 1930s -- not all of it was for advertising, right?

And that's not even counting non-Americans. As "Colour before Color," a show at Hasted Hunted curated by Martin Parr a year or so ago, demonstrated, several European photographers were doing brilliant work in color long before Eggleston's 1976 MoMA show. You can check out Luigi Ghirri's book for the proof.  

(I just saw Ghirri's show at Aperture, by the way, and if you like Eggleston, you'll probably like Ghirri.  (Eggleston wrote the foreword to Ghirri's book).  Think of an Italian Eggleston; same emphasis on color and oddball subjects, but with less down-home Southern grit and more Italian prettiness and interest in fantasy & the surreal).

 
So, put this myth to bed and go see some great Eggleston colors at the Whitney!

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Addendum:  I went to the Whitney today and saw the show.  My 2 cents:  If you like Eggleston, you'll probably like it.  If you don't, you won't.

It is what it is, and a lot of people will probably just shake their head, exasperated.  Fair enough; to each her own photographic preferences.

I, as said, really like Eggleston.  His approach to photography is very much like mine, at least as I've come to understand so far (of both him and me).  So, I've really looked at a lot Egglestons in my wanderings.  I also have 'the Guide' (two copies, actually -- bought an extra inadvertently; have been saving for someone's birthday or the other); Los Alamos; and Democratic Forest.  (I've even saved that recent documentary on my TiVo for about a year and a half, though I've seen it already).

Most of the images from the Whitney show are from one of those 3 books, unfortunately.  So, there wasn't much new stuff to excite me. The "important" new-to-me parts -- his early black-and-whites, and rooms playing two of his "videos" -- were, well, nothing to write home about.

And though I'd looked forward to seeing the "Graceland" pictures, they didn't do much for me.  The place is already weird enough; Eggleston doesn't add as much to it as he does to not-already-deliberately-strange locales.

Other less familiar stuff include pictures from "Election Eve"; his "True Stories" stuff for David Byrne; and a few from recent travels to Japan and elsewhere.  All good.

I wonder why the Whitney didn't take the opportunity to show some unfamiliar pictures.  Eggleston has taken lots of photos, and famously refuses to prefer one over the other; it's always an editor who makes the decision about what to publish or exhibit.

(NB:  Eggleston takes exactly one picture of something, and then moves on.  So he says -- and so I've seen on that documentary.    Thus, the thousands of unseen Egglestons aren't like the thousands of unseen Cartier-Bressons, e.g.  The latter may contain many not-as-good versions of images we have already seen. But the unseen Egglestons should be -- if he is to be believed about his working method -- quite distinct from the ones we have seen.)

"Los Alamos," for instance, has less than 100 images.  But I believe that the "project" from which this work is culled -- Eggleston's wanderings from Memphis to California, and back, several times, during the early 1970s -- has thousands of images. Eggleston himself views those thousands of pictures as "the project" (or, simply, the work), not the very few selected for publication.

I would love to see those photographs.  

Oh well; maybe that what the Web is for.