Thirty years ago photography was art if it was black and white. Color pictures were tacky and cheap, the stuff of cigarette ads and snapshot albums. So in 1976, when William Eggleston had a solo show of full-color snapshotlike photographs at the august Museum of Modern Art, critics squawked.

Shirley concurs. “He calls me up every now and then, asks how I’m doing, and I say, ‘Good,’” she says, fond but firm. She is pleased to own an Eggleston photograph at home and proud of his success, but, like the Lamp’s regulars, her feelings for her famous neighbor are complicated. “I like Bill, but he can’t come in here. Will you be sure and tell him I said hello?”

The man. The myth. The magic.
My lonely dissent holds up, readingwise, I think, even if it's spitting into an urban legend cyclone.
- tom moody 11-07-2008 2:43 pm [add a comment]

you have an interesting take. history loves heros but we all know its a little more complicated than that. thanks for spitting, tom.
- bill 11-07-2008 3:25 pm [add a comment]

Eggleston’s uses of color insult intellectual values that long defined modern photography, including the work of his early heroes Cartier-Bresson and Evans. Carefully modulated black-and-white tonality conduces to mental as well as optical clarity; color befuddles. Eggleston’s receptiveness to chromatic profusion extends to a sense of space that spills beyond the limits of the framing edge. One of his best-known pictures shows a besuited white man outdoors with a deferential black servant. The tacit social commentary founders in surrounding details which surely any other photographer would have cropped out. At the show, I was mildly shocked to realize that my own memory had edited the image in exactly that way, framing a meaning that Eggleston’s actual composition, while not denying it, fastidiously de-emphasizes. He’s an aesthete, not a propagandist. His great subject is the too-muchness of the real. He does regularly suppress one significant element of lived experience: time. His art re-proves Roland Barthes’s influential theory of the punctum—a Proustian quantum of lost time—as intrinsic to photography’s emotional power. The hour on Eggleston’s clock is always right now. Whatever is dated in his early subjects—car models, hairdos—barges into the present with a redolence of William Faulkner’s famous remark that the past isn’t only not dead, it isn’t even past.

the hound posted egglestons whole video movie. cheg it oot.
- bill 1-23-2009 3:47 pm [add a comment]