Time is a magician and age is its cloak. I remember watching footage of Augusto Pinochet when he was arrested in London in 1998 and wondering if this doddering old man could really be responsible for around three thousand deaths in Chile and many more human rights violations during his premiership. Likewise when I see the latest tabloid pictures of infamous serial killers ageing in jail it sometimes feels difficult to associate these faces - withering in an all too human way - with the terrible misdeeds that the headline attributes to them. There's a disparity between the reputation and reality.
At the risk of sounding like a callous aesthete, any controversial act creates an aura for its perpetrator and in the long haul fame and infamy may not be dissimilar. If it's merely a question of longevity then perhaps from posterity's point of view the greater the controversy the better. In this sense - and putting questions of morality to one side (although Wilde and Nabokov argued that art was inherently amoral) - great art is like great crime because it implies a rupture with what has gone before and because of that presumption immediately evokes a mystery as to its origins. We feel the need to interrogate the artist, to question their motivations, their whereabouts.
'Well, I mean, who hasn't been arrested a few times? I don't know why everyone wants to make such a big deal about that.' So said renowned photographer William Eggleston to an interviewer for Memphis Magazine in 1994. Watching him prowling through the streets with his beloved Leica camera on a commission for Gus Van Sant in William Eggleston in the Real World we might wonder, can this indecipherable and elderly alcoholic who plays such terrible organ music really be William Eggleston? Why should this not be the infamous radical who changed the photographic landscape, and influenced a generation of avant-garde filmmakers including David Lynch, with colour images that are so intensely present that they seem to be stolen rather than taken?
The reclusive Eggleston admits in the documentary that at first he found it challenging to invade people's space to take their photograph. As with the Indians who reportedly feared that the camera would steal their soul, so Eggleston seems aware of a similar danger for his subjects. Such fears take us back to the artist's ancestor the shaman, who might commune with a mirror world and advise the tribe by its example. Yet those mirror images, those plays, would have such power, such involvement, that the watcher would fear to become lost in this alternate reality. They would fear to become their depicted self. So the shaman was a potential threat as well as saviour, a potential criminal as well as a pillar of the community and should his magic fail, his capacity to generate the mirror world, then likewise his protective aura might fatally diminish.
In these media-dominated days the artist may also fear to become their depicted self, to be trapped in someone else's magic, and equally the aging artist may fear a diminution of their power. Hence Eggleston exasperatedly directs attention back towards his work and away from his life. It's true that Eggleston has spent much of his life defying social norms and pursuing a determinedly individualistic path. Yet this very individualism - alcoholism, an open marriage, a fetish for guns less unusual in the United States - has attracted attention. As with Pinochet's feebleness in 1998 we might wonder how much of Eggleston's evasiveness regarding his artistic intentions in William Eggleston in the Real World is a disingenuous attempt to duck the question and avoid blame. To avoid easy answers that might reduce the art and solve the mystery. At this point the ancestral shaman divides into the politician and the artist, the former at the centre of society and the latter now increasingly at the periphery where the criminals are supposed to be.
Each Eggleston photograph - taken quickly in the street - is like a hit and run. The photographer, like the criminal, wants to be associated with the prestige of a perfect crime but would prefer to deny direct responsibility through alibis such as 'instinct' and 'intuition', thus maintaining the mystery. So each photograph becomes a manslaughter rather than a murder, taken not intended, and Eggleston continues avoiding easy answers, working in his own informal economy - a black market of colours and compositions, forms and signifiers - standing outside society so that he can look in on it and trade a glance. So art is a way to see in the dark, into the shadows cast by society.
William Eggleston was born on July 27 1939 in Memphis , Tennessee . In 1957 at the age of eighteen he acquired his first camera, a Canon rangefinder, having previously used his father's. In 1959 he read Henri Cartier-Bresson's 'The Decisive Moment' and Walker Evans' 'American Photographs' and in 1965 he began to experiment with colour film. At that time Cartier-Bresson was famous for his doctrine: ' photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as of a precise organization of forms which give that event its proper expression.' Eggleston would take from Cartier-Bresson his predilection for a Leica 35 mm camera with a 50 mm lens, which Eggleston still uses today, as well as the principle of taking a photograph intuitvely, almost instantaneously, before swiftly moving on.
From Walker Evans Eggleston took the everyday and the commonplace as his subject matter but, as he did with Cartier-Bresson, discarded the political agenda and ultimately any pretensions to pure documentary. In 1967 he went to New York to meet photographers Garry Winogrand and Lee Friedlander, who were breaking down the barrier between the photographer and the subject in their documentary work, and Diane Arbus, who was beginning to turn away from fashion models and photograph outsiders.
Eggleston was pursuing a parallel course but moved beyond them all in his use of colour. Up until that point colour photography was the province of glossy magazines and advertsing. Technically it had been slow to achieve the same quality as black and white film and artistically it had been barely exploited because photographers were generally unsure how to manipulate colour in the way that they could manipulate other factors such as perspective, framing and composition. Eggleston still employs a dye-transfer technique for his prints that allows him to control individual colours and exaggerate them according to the emphasis that he desires. Hence in his photographs the colours are often extraordinarily vivid, verging on an expressionistic or even an abstract painting. This method, now long out-moded, was originally developed for commercial purposes.
When John Szarkowski organised an exhibition of Eggleston's work at the New York Museum of Modern Art in 1976, the first solo exhibition of colour photographs at the museum, the show was met with critical outrage precisely because colour photography was considered to be irredeemably vulgar, tainted through commercialism and popular use (Eggleston often visited industrial photo labs to study the photographs of ordinary people). Walker Evans himself had said as much, explaining that colour photography was the proper medium for vulgar subjects. When Szarkowski called the photographs 'perfect' Hilton Kramer, the art critic of The New York Times, responded 'Perfect? Perfectly banal' and another critic called it 'the most hated show of the year.'
Yet it wasn't simply the use of colour that offended the critics. Eggleston declared himself to be 'at war with the obvious.' To the critics everything on display in the photographs seemed obvious because it was apparently mundane: a dog lapping at a puddle, an old lady sitting on an outdoor couch, an elderly man perched on a bed holding a gun, the inside of an oven, a tree. However today these photographs still seem uttely distinctive and unusual. In their extraordinary ordinariness they give us the eyes to see the spectrum that exists beyond the visible light of the 'apparently mundane.' So the use of vivid colour becomes utterly appropriate and organic within the photograph and the photographer's endeavour.
Critic Terrence Rafferty has spoken of the 'hung-over brightness' of Eggleston's photographs and perhaps their most unsettling aspect is that they do have that sense of thereness, of immediacy, that follows a trauma whether it be as trivial as a drinking binge or as serious as a near-death escape.
It's this quality, as well as Eggleston's focus on the miscellania of experience, that has influenced filmmakers such as David Lynch in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me , Sofia Coppola in The Virgin Suicides and Gus Van Sant's Elephant . In each of those films a cataclysmic rupture is about to be experienced. The latter two films in particular have a very specfic time and locale that demands a certain immediacy to convey the themes of the films. When the bigger issues defy thought we focus on the smaller things. Yet in doing so those smaller things acquire a resonance that may tend towards abstraction. Hence the characters in Elephant become archetypes through their colourful t-shirts. It need hardly be added that a filmmaker such as Lynch, or Harmony Korine for that matter, can identify with the uncanniness that Eggleston finds just over the white picket fence and Lynch in particular uses rich colours to create an atmosphere of seductive dread.
Since that first exhibition Eggleston's reputation has thrived. He has relentlessly taken photographs all over the world in the same inimitable style. He develops every photograph, placing them in boxes for editors to organise into collections. He is now the subject not only of William Eggleston in the Real World but also of another documentary shortly to be released, By the Ways: A journey with William Eggleston . With the discovery of his own documentary Standed in Canton , depicting his bohemian set in the 1970s, Eggleston is also coming to be seen as an innovator in the moving image. In 1989 he released a collection of photographs titled The Democratic Forest, making explicit his intention that every subject was up for grabs: there should be no hierarchy of value.
Yet how to explain the sense of unease in these paeans to aesthetic equality, the sense of something missing? The absence in the photographs, the ghost in the lens, seems to be Eggleston himself. In the choice of setting, framing, composition and colour we experience his vision, his peculiar brand of personal documentary. Is it too much to speculate that his obsessive drive for personal and artistic freedom is interrelated with his alienation from the world, especially the world where he grew up?
If the photographs have the aura of the scene of a crime, in which the 'decisive moment' has inevitably passed, then who is the guilty party? In William Eggleston in the Real World director Michael Almereyda notes that Eggleston picked up his first camera the same year that his father died. As a photographer Eggleston has never looked back, yet perhaps precisely because of that there remains something child-like about him. It's always too easy to draw upon cheap biographical or psychological explanations of an artist's work but it doesn't seem too much, or too little, to say that the darkness visible in Eggleston's otherwise vibrant photography may be his own. Peter Fraser
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