John Stathatos
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Despite photography's current ubiquity in the art world, its commercial exploitation can still seem oddly hesitant and confused, even where figures of undoubted stature and historical importance are concerned. Behind this insecurity lie continuing worries over such technical issues as print longevity and exclusivity; the relatively small number of serious non-institutional collectors for contemporary work; and the absence, in most cases, of a fixed and undisputed canon of works, something made inevitable by the nature of photographic materials and the working habits of most photographers. Among late 20th-century photographers, the reputation of William Eggleston must be regarded as reasonably secure; John Szarkowski, who curated his New York Museum of Modern Art exhibition in 1976 and wrote the essay introducing William Eggleston's Guide, claimed hyperbolically that Eggleston had "invented" colour photography, while in 1981 Sally Eauclaire made his saturated images of the southern United States one of the cornerstones of her New Color Photography. Eggleston's influence has been considerable, and extends well beyond his own medium; he became of those rare artists whose vision dominates perception of a place or subject, so that we now 'see' the American south through his eyes, much as earlier generations saw Italy through the eyes of Salvator Rosa or England through the eyes of Constable. Wim Wenders' film Paris, Texas, to take but one example, owes much of its visual impact to Eggleston, an inspiration implicitly aknowledged when the director exhibited a series of colour photographs directly modelled on those of the master. Some photographers work with their heads, while others seem to proceed intuitively. Eggleston is very much an empathic photographer, the success of whose images appears to depend on a degree of reflexive familiarity with his working environment. The problem with this gift is that the further he distances himself from his southern roots, the more unsure these images become; in Europe, in particular, his instincts betray him completely, and his photographs of London and Berlin are dispiritingly flat. Eggleston's second major monograph, The Democratic Forest (1989), ranged considerably further afield than the Guide and was correspondingly more diffuse and less self-assured. Nevertheless, Eggleston rightly continues to be seen as a major practitioner and honoured accordingly: he was awarded the Hasselblad award for photography in 1998, and is to be the subject of a major retrospective at the Getty Museum. This makes it harder to understand the thinking behind the very uneven exhibition of work recently shown at Michael Hue-Williams. Thirteen of the prints on show were Cibachromes from the limited-edition Cadillac Portfolio, all of them taken using 2 1/4" square format between 1966 and 1971. There is, it must be said, a strong sense of scraping the bottom of the barrel to these images; some, like the close-up of a young woman silhouetted against the sky, are long past their sell-by date, the colours shifted beyond recovery, the sky gone acid green and the flesh yellow. Judging by the coarseness of the grain, one or two other photographs looked like the result of re-photographing an aged print whose negative had gone missing; the casual portrait of a woman in a fox fur and gloves accompanied by an odd-looking young boy, like a wannabe Diane Arbus in thin colours, was slightly but distinctly blurred as a result. Nor does Eggleston seem comfortable with the square format, which imposes its own rather rigid composition, quite unlike the photographer's usual fluidity with the 35mm Leica. At his best, Eggleston is a poet of entropy and decay. Everything is temporary; metal rusts, paint peels, people age, weeds invade, paper fades and light congeals, as was made clear by a small number of images which had all the old magic: the back wall of a bar dominated by three fake bronze busts, that of Martin Luther King adorned with a pair of painted-on, staring eyeballs; the facade of a cut-price electrical goods store entirely covered in a palimpsest of signs offering cheap air conditioners and stereos, its tackiness redeemed by the luminous golden cloud hovering just behind it; the black man facing the camera in a white hat, shades and a minute schoolboy's necktie barely reaching to his sternum; and the rusting, upside-down Chevrolet whose Power Glide finally betrayed it. |
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| © John Stathatos, 2002 Unpublished (but commissioned) review, February 2000 |
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