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.

The White City

As my wife and I stood by and waited for a man with a machete to open our coconuts so that we could drink the sweet milk from inside, I was overwhelmed with joy.  The love of life and the simple pleasures of a coconut in the graveyard hung a toothy grin on my face that could be seen from the moon.  Tinny voices echoed off of the marble and granite, a rapid fire accounting of a football match the groundskeepers were following.  Majestic palms towered over me and stretched towards the grey sky above.  I knew that we were lucky to be given this chance to walk in the warm light of the sun, and feel the thick, humid air of the tropical morning.  It was good to be among the living, inside the walls of the the White City, a city of the dead.

It seems that if you go anywhere in Guayaquil, Ecuador, you pass the Cementerio General, or the White City, as it is also known due to the color of the gravestones that jut out from patches of vibrant green grass.  It's omnipresence is a reminder that, for all of us, that there is an end to our terrestrial wandering.  Of the many times I have visited Guayaquil, home to my wife's sprawling Latin family, the cemetery tempted me, but we had never gone.  I'm not sure I can account for why we hadn't, but we always seemed to have something else to do, and then there were the warnings that it was a dangerous place where bandits hid out amongst the tombs waiting to rob you or take you on a ride in the trunk of an economy sized sedan until your loved ones forked over the customary ransom.  As luck would have it, we didn't encounter any danger, save for the steep slopes of the Cerro del Carmen, the hill that dominates the surrounding landscape of the banks of the Rio Guayas.

We arrived by taxi having come from the suburban sprawl of Samborondon, passing through the tunnel that cuts under the neighborhood of Las Peñas, where multicolored shanties cling to the hillside.  We paid our fare and walked past the women selling flowers and other religious trinkets that we had no good use for and politely declined.  A guard took our names and looked over our passports, just in case we disappeared in the vast crypts I supposed, or maybe there was some truth to all of the wild rumors we had heard.  Nevertheless, I felt it was worth the risk.  

The area closest to the entrance is pristinely maintained and there are wide avenues where the ghosts of the families of means are free to congregate much as they would in the private clubs and gated neighborhoods they inhabit in life.  The magnificent sculptures portray faces with such detail that you can imagine the figures stepping down off their pedestals and out into the street.  As we carried on, we read the epitaphs and the dates marking the borders of a persons existence, imagining what they were like and the many things they had seen and done and how they came to meet their fate.  

There are also mausoleums and shrines that hint at the varying tastes of the eras in which they were constructed from the early nineteenth century when the cemetery was founded onwards.  There are politicians, and generals, as well as their rivals, all tossed in together, their battles fought, their swords gone to rust.  Men of letters, whose lives are confined to the space of a paragraph by the limits of the real estate they are allotted are there too, and lovers whose bodies are rendered in cold hard stone unable to give solace to the heartbroken.  A sea of bones lies under this ground, the history of the city and the nation outside, and one of many on this earth that we have filled with them.

There is a separate area in the cemetery, where Jews are interred as necessitated by social norms in this overwhelmingly Catholic country.  Their burials are marked with the Star of David and stones in lieu of flowers; their grave sites simpler without the grand ceremony of the Christian dead.  It was in this section where my wife and I first paused and gazed out on the crowded neighborhoods and skyscrapers that advanced outside the walls of the White City.  There was a breeze and we drank it in.  I left Mariella with a kiss as I proceeded up the steep slopes toward the ridge for a better view.  I stopped to take a few pictures and occasionally to pay respects to those who had passed on.  With each step, the burials became more erratic until they seemed to be stacked one on top of the other and the grounds were left untended.  Where there was neglect, the earth itself had begun to take over and the gnarled roots of short, hearty trees cracked stone.  I felt my heartbeat quicken with the altitude and the stifling view.  My heart was heavy and my mind burdened with the thought that those overlooked in life are also left unremembered in death.  I stopped in front of a small stone cross that bore crude lettering that indicated that two children were buried here, ages 6 and 9, names unknown.  I stood there alone and let tears well up in my eyes and stream down my face and whispered a prayer of rest for their souls and turned to slowly descend back towards where my wife was waiting.

After I found her and we had our break, I finished up my roll of film and we found where Mariella's family plot was located, conveniently close to the exit.  We visited her great grandmother and talked about how nice it would be to sleep amongst such good company.  We had always considered ourselves the kind to be cremated, our ashes tossed into the wind, but now I'm not so sure.  Walking through a graveyard is a good thing, no matter where you happen to be.  It's quiet, and a good place to think about things that tend to be put off when we're sitting at our desks, or in line at the grocery store, or staring at the tail end of the car in front of us in traffic.  I won't tell you any of those things that people like to throw in your face like, "live every day like it's your last", or "dance like nobody's watching", and all the other nonsense that sells books and diet plans these days.  I'm not qualified to do that, and besides, I'm not sure if that's always the best advice.  I can say one thing for certain though, it's good to eat coconuts in a graveyard.