WILLIAM EGGLESTON 414

Both a rebel and poet, with a photographic oeuvre and hellraiser reputation preceding him, William Eggleston is perhaps, the American South’s greatest living photographer. And only last month, Steidl’s latest publishing, William Eggleston 414, by Juergen Teller and Harmony Korine, gives readers a chance to peer into the enigmatic life of Eggleston.

The book is a visual memoir of a road trip 10 years ago with the Eggleston, and his son, Winston. From Memphis to Mississippi, the journey records an intimate and spontaneous experience, and a love for the great American road. Korine and Teller’s photographs accompany introductions from both artists, with pictures of gas stations, abandoned trucks, evangelical houses, banal landscapes, hotel rooms and candid portraits. Indeed some photographs hark back to Eggleston’s pictorial tropes — strings of coloured electric lights, road signs and people in cars. But as expected, William Eggleston steals the show with his aristocratic charm, eccentricities, and smooth, refined dress.

"We had no real plans. No goals. Just followed the light. We drove like this for a few days. On the last night, Eggleston played us the piano. He was wearing black leather gloves. I think there was a pistol somewhere in the room. It was beautiful." — Harmony Korine

Though he may need no introduction, Juergen Teller, born in Germany, is famous for his fashion photography, with some of his works published in Vogue, System, i-D, POP and Arena Homme+. And Harmony Korine, alternatively, was born in Los Angeles and is a filmmaker, artist and screenwriter. He has written and directed the cult films Gummo (1997), Breakers (2012) and The Beach Bums (2020).

William Eggleston, born in Memphis, 1939, was raised in pampered gentility on the family cotton farm in Mississippi. The artist has himself toyed with the idea of photography being more of a hobby; he had very little interest in commercialising his work for money, naturally lending to the fact he was moneyed in the first place. Ostensibly after being asked to photograph a wedding, he spent the day framing cloud formations. The negatives came back, and it’s hard to imagine Eggleston was paid for the work, nor cared.

Growing up, Eggleston drifted through a series of educational establishments, neglecting to study, thus never acquiring his degree. It wasn’t until he came across Henri Cartier- Bresson’s The Decisive Moment and the photographer Walker Evans, that he became inspired by photography. He discovered Kodachrome film in 1967, sensing colour might work for him, in the same way black and white film worked for Cartier-Bresson.

Known for capturing everyday, suburban life in his hometown of Memphis, Tennessee, his sitters include family and friends, as well as musicians and artists.

Eggleston’s infamous Colour Photographs exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art was both brave and transgressive. A common misapprehension is that this exhibition wasn’t the first time the public experienced colour photography as an art form, earlier photographers such as Ernst Haas and Saul Leiter had already elegantly tread that ground. But unlike these early colourists, Eggleston had no interest in making pictures which seduced its viewers.

Today, the way we view art and the modern world is a direct result of William Eggleston’s work. His unique photographic style gets under your skin with a tinge of menace. The deception, or genius, lie in the supposed simplicity of his art. Eggleston’s method for shooting is that he doesn’t have one. Capturing a photograph for him is instinctual, he famously remarked that he only shoots one frame, then moves onto the next. Never worrying about the misses, because there will always be another picture to take. Perhaps the injection of menace in his photographs is from the skittishness of the sitters, we’re never quite sure whether the subject is a stranger or an acquaintance.

To mention a few of his most famous photographic books, The Democratic Forest, Election Eve, For Now and William Eggleston’s Guide are notable titles, all carrying the unsettling southern gothic undertones.

Eggleston’s friend, the novelist Eudora Welty wrote perceptively about the atmosphere of abandonment that pervades his work, and their sense that human drama has just departed the frame. In 1989, in the introduction to The Democratic Forest, she pens: “In landscapes, cityscapes, street scenes, roadside scenes, at every sort of public converging-point, in dreaming long view and arresting close-up, through hours of dark and light, he sets forth what makes up our ordinary world. What is there, however strange, can be accepted without question; familiarity will be what overwhelms us.”

Familiarity will be what overwhelms us — a rather biting elucidation of the unexplainable mystery behind Eggleston’s photographs. And in fact, Eggleston attempts to explain it here: ‘A picture is what it is, and I've never noticed that it helps to talk about them, or answer specific questions about them, much less volunteer information in words. It wouldn't make any sense to explain them. Kind of diminishes them. People always want to know when something was taken, where it was taken, and, God knows, why it was taken. It gets really ridiculous. I mean, they're right there, whatever they are.’

William Eggleston's Guide was, says Parr, 'lambasted at the time for being crude and simplistic, like Robert Frank's Americans before it, when in fact, it was both alarmingly simple and utterly complex. It took people a long time to understand Eggleston. Even when he had the big Barbican show over here in 1990, people were baffled, and it was considered a flop.’

His most famous photograph, The Red Ceiling, also known as Greenwood, Mississippi 1973 carries with it some ‘indefinable sense of menace’. An instantly recognisable photo. ‘It’s so powerful’, he once said, ‘that I have never seen it reproduced on the page to my satisfaction. When you look at the dye transfer print, it’s like red blood that’s wet on the wall. It shocks you every time.’
William Eggleston’s photographs leave you with a sense of banality, yet they exceed banality; they are loaded with meaning and menace, utterly simple, yet extraordinarily complex — like Hemingway’s Iceberg Theory, they’re deceptively simple, much like Hemingway’s novels.