Courtesy Cheim & Read, New York. © Eggleston Artistic Trust

"Untitled" (1975) Dye transfer print, 16 x 20 in.

Courtesy Cheim & Read, New York. © Eggleston Artistic Trust

William Eggleston in Memphis, ca. 1970

   November 2008 Books

Anton Kannemeyer

The Brussels Dream

Lynne Marsh

Frances Stark

Donald Rodney

Oranges and Sardines

Renzo Martens

Dóra Maurer

Munio Weinraub and Amos Gitai

Sharon Lockhart

Stephan Balkenhol

Terence Gower

Jacques Bedel

Wassily Kandinsky Henri Cartier-Bresson New York Sales Preview From Good Stock Guggenheim Goes to Abu Dhabi Fall’s Best Museum Offerings Guggenheim Gala Lights Up the Night Impressionist & Modern Art

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Since William Eggleston famously ambled into the Museum of Modern Art in 1967 with a briefcase of color slides to show then curator of photography John Szarkowski, he has gone on to radically influence the direction of contemporary photography and, with it, contemporary visual culture as we know it. His embrace of the quotidian—in brilliantly hued images of tricycles, ramshackle rooms, toy figures, and the backs of heads—established a new American aesthetic, one ruthlessly and surreally straightforward. In 1976, Szarkowski called his pictures “perfect,” prompting Hilton Kramer to respond that they were “perfectly banal, perhaps.” Viewers can judge for themselves this month, when Eggleston’s first US retrospective opens at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.

Given that you are often said to have invented color photography, do you have a favorite color or palette? Certain photographs of yours, like Red Ceiling [1973], with its one bare bulb burning against those blood-red walls, are so sumptuously monochromatic.
Actually, when I was growing up, my favorite color was green. I still love it. It’s funny because in some ways it’s the opposite of red; on the color wheel and all, red and green are actually very antagonistic to each other.

The band Big Star used that photograph as the cover art for their Radio City LP, right? A band you also played piano with.
Does music continue to inspire you?

Well, I’ve always been a musician. But I would have to say that my favorite idol in music is Bach. My favorite painter has always been Kandinsky—he’s crazy.

Is it Kandinsky’s work’s relationship to music that you find an affinity with? He once compared painting to the act of making music, saying, “Color is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammer, the soul is the piano with many strings.”

That could be it—yes. There’s a book that he authored that was recently given to me that’s just wonderful. It’s called Concerning the Spiritual in Art [first published in 1911]. Now, don’t confuse his use of “spiritual” with the American usage of the word. In his case, you could almost interchange “spiritual” with “theory.” You should go out and get it tonight! The book is about how colors interact. It akes me know that whatever I was thinking about—in terms of my own pictures and
color—that I was right.

What about photographic influences?
At the beginning of my career, in the late ’50s, Henri Cartier-Bresson was my absolute hero. He was the first photographer I had seen who had a complete understanding of the principles of painting and composition. He was like Degas in some ways. With Cartier-Bresson, you didn’t really need color.

The American landscape has changed a lot since you started taking photographs. Has this changed your work—or your approach to it—over time? Was it more interesting to document then or now?

That’s a hard one to answer. I know that it has, but I’m just so absorbed in the act of making the photographs. I’m looking around at everything, but I’m not trying to compute what is here or what used to be there; I’m simply deeply in the process of making a picture. And I only take one picture of anything ever. If I take a roll of 36 exposures, then I have 36 different pictures. And I don’t really edit. I let people I trust—people like Thomas Weski [cocurator of Eggleston’s Whitney survey]—do the editing for me.

What are you working on now?
I’m working on a long-term project in Paris. The Cartier Foundation commissioned me to photograph the city—all of it. I particularly love some of the parks and the industrial landscapes there. I almost live in two places now—here in Memphis and over there, as every month or so I go over. But I’d rather live in Paris, I think.

“William Eggleston: Democratic Camera, Photopraphs and Video, 1961–2008,” Nov. 7– Jan. 25, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Whitney.org. The Cartier Foundation, Paris, will exhibit Eggleston’s photos of the city of light next spring, Fondation.Cartier.com.
"William Eggleston" originally appeared in the November 2008 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' November 2008 Table of Contents.