Egg

It’s hard to justify to nonbelievers what makes William Eggleston’s work so resonant.  In fact, there were plenty of people who hated it 1976, when color photography was still frowned upon, and I’m sure there are plenty who hate it now.  Notwithstanding his popularity in the world of galleries, and the art press, his work is paradoxically democratic and elitist.  He dares you to say, “I don’t see what the big deal is, I could do that.”   He is everything that people outside the art community hate about art, and the subjective appreciation of one over the other.  A good example of this is Eggleston’s picture of the inside of a freezer or the underside of a bed, or the fact that he doesn’t give audacious titles to his images.  He just does what he does and dares the world to deny it.  

While you can look at a photo like Untitled 1965, (the one with the kid pushing grocery carts), and figure out what makes you feel warm and fuzzy about it (the golden tinged nostalgia of 50’s era America, in brilliant color), there are plenty of others that to most people seem like you handed a disposable camera to some kid and sent them out in the neighborhood to take pictures of things they found interesting.  Often times, body parts are cut off at the margins, and mundane objects like a haphazardly placed axe, or Christmas lights strung around a pole in a parking lot are the chosen subject matter.  Everything you are taught to do, is thrown out the window, and composition and color take prominence over all else.  I can see why the critics were almost unanimous in their scorn for his first MoMA exhibition, and the only thing that surprises me, is that he somehow survived the battering and kept going.  It’s a commentary on the absurdity of the human condition that in the early days, he was battling the very same people who are his greatest champions today.

I won’t tell you that you should care about William Eggleston, you either like his work or you don’t.  But if you are a photographer, I can tell you that it’s worth your time to find out.  As a resident of the South, it’s easy for me to identify with the familiar landscapes that are represented in Egg’s photos, and his embrace of the mundane.  Eggleston is also an interesting character, whose life seems to be a work of art all it’s own.  For further study, his film “Stranded in Canton” is a weird, wild ride that gives us a glimpse of his world and the underground characters that were part of his social circle.   

Eggleston blazed a path and revolutionized modern photography by embracing and uplifting the mundane and everyday, and I still haven’t seen anybody who does what he does any better.  I think of him as being out of the same mold as a William Burroughs or Henry Miller.  A man ahead of his time who is willing to bear the scrutiny of critics in pursuit of his own unique passion.  He stands out as a fearless, debauched weirdo from Mississippi, shooting roll after roll in empty parking lots and dusty second hand stores.  Now that he’s written about and praised so profusely, he probably still doesn’t give a damn whether he is considered an artist, and I’m sure he doesn’t spend too much time thinking about each and every frame he’s shot over his decades long career.  My guess is that he probably would have done the same had he never been recognized, and that is something that is truly admirable, whether you like his pictures or not.  

Larry's Legacy

I recently listened to the episode of WTF where Marc interviewed Larry Clark.  For those who know little about photography, Larry Clark wouldn’t ring any bells, but for those who do, he looms pretty large in the modern lexicon.  I had always assumed that Clark had started shooting in the 70’s.  After all, it makes sense when you look at the material in his seminal work, “Tulsa”.  It is a stark, brutal and honest work that peeked behind the curtain at an America that few people knew existed, except for those that lived it.  The images were shot by Larry in Tulsa, where he worked assisting his mom in door to door baby portraiture.  In the Maron podcast, he revealed that he had shot most of the material while he hung out doing drugs with his friends after work.  He always had his camera with him and so nobody thought much of him snapping pictures as they lay around with syringes sticking from their arms, or engaged in casual sexual contact.

Among the surprising elements for me, was that he said that he began shooting in 1959.  To put that in perspective, Eisenhower was President, the Vietnam War had not begun, and people still weren’t sure if rock and roll was going to be around in five years.  

While it’s true that literature had begun to peel back the layers that shielded “decent society” from the underlying vice that was a fixture of the American experience, there is something about seeing it displayed in the stark contrast of Kodak Tri-X 400 that makes it much more real than the accounts of some Cambridge educated beatnik from Manhattan.

Yes, there has been since it’s inception, an element of photography that had documented the seedier side of life, but what Clark captured was different.  It was everything that the powers that be railed against in the halls of Congress and from the pulpit, laid bare for all to see.  It showed the poverty and desperation of small town life that often leads to experimentation with drugs and laissez faire sexuality that has been the blight of the heartland for generations.  It is a noir-tinged work of photojournalism that was instantly recognized as an enduring statement on fringe culture, and served as a vehicle for Clark himself to escape the stifling suffocation of rural Oklahoma, and pursue a career in film and the arts.

Unsurprisingly, Clark himself was unsure of it’s value and had no real intention of releasing the work until he spent time outside of his hometown and upon viewing the work of Truffaut and other avant garde filmmakers, he found out there was a market for the outsider point of view.

Following the success of “Tulsa”, Clark released the seminal work, “Teenage Lust” and continued for the decades that followed to document those who live on the margins of society, as well as releasing a slew of films that are highly regarded and have had a lasting impact.

Larry said that he had never intended to be a photographer, and that he only took it up as a function of it being one of the few tools he had on hand.  When asked to give lectures to emerging photographers, his advice is for them to stop wasting time studying, and spend more time out documenting your reality.  What sticks with me about this advice, and his work, is it’s honesty.  It is something that is often overlooked in photography today.  We are inundated with images that portray life, but rarely are we shown the truth.  Oversaturated sunsets and sickly sweet photos of babies and pets dominate social media platforms, and we all strive to appear as if we are thriving and happy, and even Larry Clark’s current work often appears as a stylized version of his original work.  As photographers, we take our share of pretty pictures (it would be hard to be employed in the field if we didn't), but often the most powerful images are the ones that show a different side of life, and usually it is not very pretty.