William EgglestonArt Blart _ art and cultural memory archive

Exhibition: ‘Arthur Tress: San Francisco 1964’ at the de Young Museum, San Francisco

Exhibition dates: 3rd March – 3rd June 2012

Arthur Tress (American, b. 1940)
Untitled (Van Ness at Geary Boulevard)
1964, printed 2010-2011
Selenium-toned silver gelatin print
Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
© 2012 Arthur Tress

These early figurative urbanscapes by Arthur Tress show the beginnings of his later Surrealist pictorial style (do a Google images search on Tress to see what I mean). From the Eggleston-esque tricycle in Untitled (Ocean Beach), the three spooky faces in Untitled (Coit Tower)* to the most prescient, the photograph Untitled (Legion of Honor Museum), there is a direct thematic link to the later, more famous 1970s work. What a beautiful and disturbing photograph Legion of Honor Museum is.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

*Notice the low vantage point of the camera at knee level (as the photographer crouched down) that imparts a monumental, robo-human feel to the sculptures.

Many thankx to the de Young Museum for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Arthur Tress (American, b. 1940)
Untitled (City Hall)
1964, printed 2010-2011
Selenium-toned silver gelatin print
Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
© 2012 Arthur Tress

Arthur Tress (American, b. 1940)
Untitled (Coit Tower)
1964, printed 2010-2011
Selenium-toned silver gelatin print
Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
© 2012 Arthur Tress

Arthur Tress (American, b. 1940)
Untitled (Ocean Beach)
1964, printed 2010-2011
Selenium-toned silver gelatin print
Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
© 2012 Arthur Tress

Arthur Tress (American, b. 1940)
Untitled (Fisherman’s Wharf)
1964, printed 2010-2011
Selenium-toned silver gelatin print
Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
© 2012 Arthur Tress

In the summer of 1964, San Francisco was ground zero for a historic culture clash as the site of both the 28th Republican National Convention (the “Goldwater Convention”) and the launch of the Beatles’ first North American tour. The young photographer Arthur Tress arrived at this opportune moment in the city’s history and found himself in the midst of large-scale civil rights demonstrations and chaotic political pageantry. With a unique sensibility perfectly attuned to this quirky metropolis, he set about to capture the odd spectacle of San Francisco.

Over 70 photographs included in Arthur Tress: San Francisco 1964 range from public gatherings to impromptu street portraits, views of the peculiar contents of shop windows and commercial signs. This is the first museum exhibition of a virtually unknown body of Tress’s early work. Curator James Ganz explains, “This exhibition offers an evocative time capsule of the City by the Bay and makes a fascinating contribution to the region’s rich photographic legacy.” The exhibition runs March 3 to June 3, 2012 at the de Young Museum.

The subject matter of Arthur Tress: San Francisco 1964 breaks down into three broad categories: public gatherings, including civil rights and political rallies; portrait studies of San Franciscans; and views of shop windows, commercial signs and architectural fragments. Often these categories overlap. In photographing events such as the Auto Row demonstrations, Tress was interested in recording passive bystanders, as well as active participants. His candid images of spectators lining the streets of San Francisco, whether isolated or in groups, capture the distinctive fashions, expressions and body language of the era. The frequent incursions of commercial logos and signage add to the contemporary flavour of the photographs, effectively fixing time and place. The exhibition captures the flavour of San Francisco without featuring its most familiar monuments. Tress’s approach to the city was idiosyncratic, generally avoiding popular tourist sites such as the Golden Gate Bridge and Chinatown, while favouring mundane locales like laundromats and coffee shops. Ganz observes, “Tress is a photographer of people rather than landmarks. Given the option of pointing his lens at an attraction like Coit Tower or at a tourist observing the monument, he will always favour the human element over the architectural setting.”

Brief biography

Born in 1940, Arthur Tress was raised in Brooklyn and started experimenting with photography in his teens. After graduating from Bard College in 1962, Tress traveled internationally for four years as an ethnographic and documentary photographer. It was during this international tour that he spent the summer of 1964 in San Francisco focusing his lens on city life. Tress developed his San Francisco negatives in a communal darkroom in the Castro District and mounted two small exhibitions in North Bay galleries that summer. He went on to pursue a long and accomplished career in photography that continues to this day.

Press release from the de Young Museum website

Arthur Tress (American, b. 1940)
Untitled (Legion of Honor Museum)
1964, printed 2010-2011
Selenium-toned silver gelatin print
Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
© 2012 Arthur Tress

Arthur Tress (American, b. 1940)
Untitled (Powell Street)
1964, printed 2010-2011
Selenium-toned silver gelatin print
Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
© 2012 Arthur Tress

Arthur Tress (American, b. 1940)
Untitled (Union Square)
1964, printed 2010-2011
Selenium-toned silver gelatin print
Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
© 2012 Arthur Tress

Shooting with a large Rolleiflex camera, Tress set out to make a mosaic of the city. He photographed civil rights demonstrations and surreal shop-window displays, Beatles fans and Barry Goldwater supporters, matrons in mink, bikers in black leather, Felliniesque crowd scenes (replete with clowns), signs for doughnuts and foot-long hot dogs.

“Even though I didn’t know it, these were prescient of my later dream images,” says Tress, 71, a small, soft-spoken gent with white hair and amused blue eyes. “You can arrange spaces and tones and textures so they become theatrical in a way, and it becomes a moment that leaps out of the quotidian flow of time.” …

One picture shows a pair of old ladies, wearing hats, glasses and white gloves, casting disdainful glances at a guy on a motorcycle in a Brando-like leather jacket, tight white jeans and black gloves. His hands are crossed just like theirs, repeating the rhythm.

“This is very much within the tradition of street photography, where you contrast different classes and types of people,” Tress says.

That’s what he did in July of ’64, when the Republican National Convention was held at the Cow Palace, a month before the Beatles began their first American tour there. A crowd supporting William Scranton – the Pennsylvania governor drafted as a moderate alternative to Goldwater – held a rally in Union Square. It was disrupted by an unexpected mob of teenage girls carrying “Ringo for President” signs. Tress captured the cultural dissonance, the press of Ringo fans and plume-hatted marching band musicians. …

Like most of these images, it had never been printed or shown. Tress had all but forgotten them until he found them in some boxes in his sister’s home after she died in 2009.

“I realized there was something good here. They were really strong images,” says Tress, who had shown about 25 of them at the old Tides bookstore in Sausalito. “I think these photographs have aged well, because of their formal, slightly dreamlike quality. They transcend their time.”

He took the prints and negatives to Ganz, the curator of the Fine Arts Museums’ Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, which owns a couple of Tress’ better-known surrealist pictures. Ganz was jazzed by what he saw. Tress had new contact sheets made from the negatives, and he and Ganz picked the images that were printed for the show and the accompanying book.

Jesse Hamlin. “‘Arthur Tress: San Francisco 1964’ at the de Young,” on the SFGate website March 22, 2012 [Online] Cited 07/10/2024

Arthur Tress (American, b. 1940)
Untitled (City Hall)
1964, printed 2010-2011
Selenium-toned silver gelatin print
Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
© 2012 Arthur Tress

Arthur Tress (American, b. 1940)
Untitled (5th and Market)
1964, printed 2010-2011
Selenium-toned silver gelatin print
Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
© 2012 Arthur Tress

Arthur Tress (American, b. 1940)
Untitled
1964, printed 2010-2011
Selenium-toned silver gelatin print
Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
© 2012 Arthur Tress

Arthur Tress (American, b. 1940)
San Francisco
1964
Selenium-toned silver gelatin print
Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
© 2012 Arthur Tress

Cover of the exhibition catalogue Arthur Tress: San Francisco 1964

Back cover of the exhibition catalogue Arthur Tress: San Francisco 1964

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Golden Gate Park
San Francisco

Opening hours:
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Exhibition: ‘William Eggleston: Democratic Camera, Photographs and Video, 1961-2008’ at The Art Institute of Chicago

Exhibition dates: 27th February – 23rd May, 2010

William Eggleston (American, b. 1939) 'Untitled (Memphis, Tennessee)' 1971 from the exhibition 'William Eggleston: Democratic Camera, Photographs and Video, 1961-2008' at The Art Institute of Chicago, February - May, 2010

William Eggleston (American, b. 1939)
Untitled (Memphis, Tennessee)
1971
from 14 Pictures, 1974
Dye transfer print
15 7/8 x 19 15/16 in (40.3 x 50.6cm)
Collection of Adam Bartos
© Eggleston Artistic Trust, courtesy Cheim & Read, New York

THE classic William Eggleston, the one and only. Feel the heat of sun on body. Look at the construction of the image plane, all angles and fractures. The slight movement of the woman’s hand as she sits on a cracked yellow wall. The distance between her body and the metal pole with wrapped chain and padlock, that ice/fire tension as Minor White would say. Man with gun vs melancholy monochromatic self portrait, the reverie of the lone thinker. Colour and light as emotional sounding board, “colour as a means of discovery and expression, and as a way to highlight aspects of life hidden in plain sight.” This is what Eggleston points his democratic camera at – life hidden in plain sight, revealed in all its intricacies, in all its mundanity and glory.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thankx to Chai Lee and the Art Institute of Chicago for allowing to me reproduce the photographs in this posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

William Eggleston (American, b. 1939) 'Untitled' 1970 from the exhibition 'William Eggleston: Democratic Camera, Photographs and Video, 1961-2008' at The Art Institute of Chicago, February - May, 2010

William Eggleston (American, b. 1939)
Untitled
1970
from Los Alamos, 1965-1974 (published 2003)
Dye transfer print
16 x 20 in (40.6 x 50.8cm)
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
Purchased with funds from the Photography Committee
© Eggleston Artistic Trust, courtesy Cheim & Read, New York

William Eggleston (American, b. 1939) 'Untitled' 1975 from the exhibition 'William Eggleston: Democratic Camera, Photographs and Video, 1961-2008' at The Art Institute of Chicago, February - May, 2010

William Eggleston (American, b. 1939)
Untitled
1975
Dye transfer print
16 x 20 in (40.6 x 50.8cm)
Cheim & Read, New York
© Eggleston Artistic Trust, courtesy Cheim & Read, New York

William Eggleston (American, b. 1939) 'Untitled' c. 1971-1973 from the exhibition 'William Eggleston: Democratic Camera, Photographs and Video, 1961-2008' at The Art Institute of Chicago, February - May, 2010

William Eggleston (American, b. 1939)
Untitled
c. 1971-1973
from Troubled Waters, 1980
Dye transfer print
15 7/8 x 19 15/16 in (40.3 x 50.6cm)
Collection Marcia Dunn and Jonathan Sobel
© Eggleston Artistic Trust, courtesy Cheim & Read, New York

William Eggleston (American, b. 1939) 'Untitled' Nd from the exhibition 'William Eggleston: Democratic Camera, Photographs and Video, 1961-2008' at The Art Institute of Chicago, February - May, 2010

William Eggleston (American, b. 1939)
Untitled
Nd
from Los Alamos, 1965-1974 (published 2003)
Dye transfer print
12 x 17 3/4 inches (30.5 x 45.1cm)
Private collection
© Eggleston Artistic Trust, courtesy of Cheim & Read, New York

William Eggleston (American, b. 1939)
Untitled
Nd
from Los Alamos, 1965-1974 (published 2003)
Dye transfer print
12 x 17 3/4 in (30.5 x 45.1cm)
Private collection
© Eggleston Artistic Trust, courtesy Cheim & Read, New York

The unconventional beauty and artistry of works by photographer William Eggleston will be showcased in a major exhibition opening at the Art Institute of Chicago this winter. William Eggleston: Democratic Camera, Photographs and Video, 1961-2008 – on view from February 27 through May 23, 2010, in the Modern Wing’s Abbott Galleries (G182, G184) and Carolyn S. and Matthew Bucksbaum Gallery (G188) – is the most comprehensive retrospective to date of the Memphis-based contemporary photographer. The exhibition brings together more than 150 extraordinary images of familiar, everyday subjects with lesser-known, early black-and-white prints and provocative video recordings, all produced over a five-decade period.

Born in 1939 in Memphis, Tennessee, and raised on his family’s cotton plantation in Mississippi, William Eggleston held a casual interest in photography until 1959, when he came across photo books by Henri Cartier-Bresson and Walker Evans. Among his earliest pictures, made during stints at universities in Tennessee and Mississippi, were black-and-white scenes found in his native South, as well as portraits of friends and family members.

By the 1960s and early 1970s he had begun experimenting with colour film, and he eventually produced rich, vivid prints through the dye transfer process – prints that are created through the alignment of three separate matrices (cyan, magenta, and yellow) generated from three separate negatives (red, green, and blue filters). The resulting prints are known for the vividness and permanence of their colours. Hence, Eggleston is often credited for single-handedly ushering in the era of colour art photography.

Eager to show his work to a broader audience, Eggleston traveled to New York with a suitcase of slides and prints to meet with Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) curator John Szarkowski. This visit eventually yielded a controversial but revolutionary exhibition in 1976 – MoMA’s first solo show to feature colour photographs – and a classic accompanying book, William Eggleston’s Guide. At this point in his career, Eggleston had already distinguished himself by treating colour as a means of discovery and expression, and as a way to highlight aspects of life hidden in plain sight.

William Eggleston: Democratic Camera, Photographs and Video, 1961-2008 demonstrates Eggleston’s “democratic” approach to his photographic subjects in both colour and black-and-white. Everything that happens in front of the camera is worthy of becoming a picture for the artist – no matter how seemingly circumstantial or trivial. Eggleston finds his motifs in everyday life, resulting in telling portrayals of American culture. His iconic images such as Elvis’s Graceland, a supermarket clerk corralling grocery carts in the afternoon sunlight, and a freezer stuffed with food proves that the photographer points his “democratic camera” at everything. Eggleston’s quiet, thoughtful pictures have profoundly impacted subsequent generations of photographers, filmmakers, and scholars.

The exhibition also includes Eggleston’s cult video work, Stranded in Canton. In the 1960s, Eggleston used film to document Fred McDowell, a well-known Delta blues musician, but ultimately abandoned the film project. Eggleston later acquired a video camera and began using video to shoot in bars and in people’s homes; sometimes he shot monologues friends delivered for his video camera, most often at night. The result, Stranded in Canton, recently restored and re-edited, is a portrait of a woozy subculture that adds dimension and texture to the world of Eggleston’s colour photographs.

Internationally acclaimed, Eggleston has spent the past four decades photographing around the world, responding intuitively to fleeting configurations of cultural signs and specific expressions of local colour. By not censoring, rarely editing, and always photographing even the seemingly banal, Eggleston convinces us completely of the idea of the democratic camera.

Press release from the Art Institute of Chicago website [Online] Cited 15/05/2010 no longer available online

William Eggleston (American, b. 1939)
Untitled
Nd
from Los Alamos, 1965-1974 (published 2003)
Dye transfer print
17 3/4 x 12 in. (45.1 x 30.5cm)
Private collection.
© Eggleston Artistic Trust, courtesy Cheim & Read, New York

William Eggleston (American, b. 1939)
Untitled (Memphis Tennessee)
1965
from Los Alamos, 1965-1974 (published 2003)
Dye transfer print
17 ¾ x 12 inches (45.1 x 30.5cm)
Private collection.
© Eggleston Artistic Trust, courtesy of Cheim & Read, New York

William Eggleston (American, b. 1939)
Memphis
c. 1969-1971
from William Eggleston’s Guide, 1976
Dye transfer print
24 x 20 in (61 x 50.8cm)
Collection of John Cheim
© Eggleston Artistic Trust, courtesy Cheim & Read, New York

William Eggleston (American, b. 1939)
Morton, Mississippi
c. 1969-1970
from William Eggleston’s Guide 1976
Dye transfer print
13 3/8 x 8 11/16 in (34 x 22cm)
Cheim & Read, New York
© Eggleston Artistic Trust, courtesy Cheim & Read, New York

William Eggleston (American, b. 1939)
Huntsville, Alabama
1971
from William Eggleston’s Guide 1976
Dye transfer print
20 x 15 7/8 in (50.8 x 40.3cm)
University of Mississippi Museum and Historic Houses, Oxford
© Eggleston Artistic Trust, courtesy Cheim & Read, New York

William Eggleston (American, b. 1939)
Untitled
Nd
from Los Alamos, 1965-1974 (published 2003)
Dye transfer print
17 3/4 x 12 in (45.1 x 30.5cm)
Private collection
© Eggleston Artistic Trust, courtesy Cheim & Read, New York

William Eggleston (American, b. 1939)
En Route to New Orleans
1971-1974
from Los Alamos, 1965-1974 (published 2003)
Dye transfer print
17 3/4 x 12 in. (45.1 x 30.5cm)
Private collection
© Eggleston Artistic Trust, courtesy Cheim & Read, New York

Art Institute of Chicago
111 South Michigan Avenue
Chicago, Illinois 60603-6404
Phone: (312) 443-3600

Opening hours:
Friday – Monday 11am – 5pm
Thursday 11am – 8pm
Closed Tuesday and Wednesday

The Art Institute of Chicago website

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Exhibition: ‘William Eggleston, Paris’ at Fondation Cartier, Paris

Exhibition dates: 4th April – 21st June, 2009

William Eggleston (American, b. 1939)
Untitled from the Paris series
2006-2008
Colour print
27.9 x 35.6cm
Series of 32 works: 27 colour prints, 4 diptychs and 1 painting
Commission for the exhibition William Eggleston, Paris, Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris, 2009
Gift of the artist 2009
© Eggleston Artistic Trust, Memphis

Perhaps it’s just me, but I seem to have become a little jaded towards the recent photographs of William Eggleston.

Other than the green reflection of lights in rainwater (above) the photographs seem to have lost their unique voice, the social insight that gave his earlier work it’s zing – provocative images that challenged how we live through a meditation on subject matter, construction of space, and tone of “colour”. How the colour that surrounds us inflects our very being.

In these photographs it feels like there has been little development in his style over the years with a consequent lessening of their visual impact. Now Eggleston’s colour just feels like a party trick, performed by rote with little consequential meaning to either the colour or the image. Perhaps the way we look at the world (and how we picture it) has finally overtaken the director’s prescient creative vision – his auteurship, his authorship.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thankx to the Fondation Cartier for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting.

“In Eggleston’s best work, the work that made him famous, color is intrinsic to the meaning of the photograph. Its not simply a garnish to draw the eye. His best photographs are not ‘about’ the color; they are about larger issues that the color is used in the service of. This is whats missing in his Paris pictures. The color here is pure ornament, eye candy to seduce you into forgetting that the picture has nothing to say.”

Anonymous. “William Eggleston Mails It In From Paris,” on the Leicaphilia website April 21, 2014 [Online] Cited 06/02/2019

William Eggleston (American, b. 1939) 'Untitled', Paris series, 2006-2008

William Eggleston (American, b. 1939)
Untitled from the Ωris series
2006-2008
Colour print
27.9 x 35.6cm
Series of 32 works: 27 colour prints, 4 diptychs and 1 painting
Commission for the exhibition William Eggleston, Paris, Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris, 2009
Gift of the artist 2009
© Eggleston Artistic Trust, Memphis

For the last three years, American photographer William Eggleston has photographed the city of Paris as part of a commission for the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain. Taken throughout different seasons, these new images by one of the fathers of colour photography portray the local and the cosmopolitan, the glamorous and the gritty, the everyday and the extraordinary.

This exhibition also provides an exceptional occasion to bring together William Eggleston’s distinctive pictures and his recent paintings, an unknown aspect of his work that has never before been presented to the public.

Text from the Fondation Cartier website

William Eggleston (American, b. 1939)
Untitled from the Paris series
2006-2008
Colour print
35.6 x 27.9cm
Series of 32 works: 27 colour prints, 4 diptychs and 1 painting
Commission for the exhibition William Eggleston, Paris, Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris, 2009
Gift of the artist 2009
© Eggleston Artistic Trust, Memphis

William Eggleston’s recent book Paris, published by Steidl and commissioned by Foundation Cartier, is a collective body of work that comprises his oeuvre of color drawings and recent Paris photographs. Similar to Ben Shahn, Charles Scheeler, Diego Rivera, Man Ray, Robert Rauschenberg and Ed Ruscha, Eggleston has reached out beyond photography to express his creative talents.

The photographs and drawings are intertwined throughout the book, creating an interesting visual cadence. The page spreads illustrate various layout designs, including a single image of either a photograph or drawing on a spread, pairs of drawings and photographs and pairs of drawing facing a photograph. All of the drawings and photographs are contained within the boundaries of the page. …

We know mostly of Eggleston’s photographs, but from the dating on one of the drawings included in this book, we can determine that Eggleston has been working with the drawing medium since 1968. It is interesting to speculate as to how one medium may have influenced the other for Eggleston. As an example, the earlier photographs by Shahn and Scheeler seem to have had an influence on how these two artists subsequently worked their framing, pictorial space, mass & line quality in their subsequent paintings.

The Paris photographs that Eggleston made of graffiti or his tight framing in conjunction with a longer lens to compress the pictorial space are visually similar in style to his drawings. The subjects he photographs are framed to create similar vibrant color masses and lines as his drawing, abstracting reality into basic graphic components. …

Eggleston’s photographs are constructed like spontaneous glances; partial views of what might be consider a traditional subject, creating color abstractions of lines, patterns and mass. Trees, pipes, people, walls, garbage, décor, wall paper, display windows are bisected and truncated, with edges and lines following out of the photographs borders. These images seem to be created by a restless and nervous energy.

With these drawings, paintings and photographs, Eggleston shows a interesting handling of these mediums and offers an insight as to how influential the period of Abstract Expressionism is to his photographic process.

Extract from Douglas Stockdale. “William Eggleston – Paris,” on The PhotoBook Journal website September 12, 2009 [Online] Cited 06/02/2019

Fondation Cartier
261, Boulevard Raspail
75014 Paris, France

Opening hours:
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Closed on Mondays
Late closing on Tuesday, at 10 pm

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Exhibition: ‘William Eggleston: Democratic Camera, Photographs and Video, 1961-2008’ at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

Exhibition dates: 7th November, 2008 – 25th January, 2009

William Eggleston (American, b. 1939) 'Untitled' c. 1971-1973 from the exhibition Exhibition: 'William Eggleston: Democratic Camera, Photographs and Video, 1961-2008' at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Nov 2008 - Jan 2009

William Eggleston (American, b. 1939)
Untitled
c. 1971-1973
From Troubled Waters 1980
Dye-transfer print
© Eggleston Artistic Trust

One of the most influential photographers of the last half-century, William Eggleston has defined the history of colour photography. This exhibition is the artist’s first retrospective in the United States and includes both his colour and black-and-white photographs as well as Stranded in Canton, the artist’s video work from the early 1970s.

William Eggleston’s great achievement in photography can be described in a straightforward way: he captures everyday moments and transforms them into indelible images. William Eggleston: Democratic Camera, Photographs and Video, 1961-2008 presents a comprehensive selection from nearly fifty years of image-making.

Born in 1939 in Sumner, Mississippi, a small town in the Delta region, Eggleston showed an early interest in cameras and audio technology. While studying at various colleges in the South, he purchased his first camera and came across a copy of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s book The Decisive Moment (1952). In the early 1960s, Eggleston married and moved to Memphis, where he has lived ever since. He first worked in black-and-white, but by the end of the decade began photographing primarily in colour. Internationally acclaimed and widely traveled, Eggleston has spent the past four decades photographing all around the world, conveying intuitive responses to fleeting configurations of cultural signs and moods as specific expressions of local colour. Psychologically complex and casually refined, bordering on kitsch and never conventionally beautiful, these photographs speak principally to the expanse of Eggleston’s imagination and have had a pervasive influence on all aspects of visual culture. By not censoring, rarely editing, and always photographing, Eggleston convinces us of the idea of the democratic camera.

This exhibition was organised by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, in association with Haus der Kunst, Munich.

Text from the Whitney Museum of American Art website

Many thankx to the Whitney Museum of American Art for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

William Eggleston (American, b. 1939) 'Untitled' 1973 from the exhibition Exhibition: 'William Eggleston: Democratic Camera, Photographs and Video, 1961-2008' at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Nov 2008 - Jan 2009

William Eggleston (American, b. 1939)
Untitled (Baby Doll Cadillac)
1973, printed 1996
From the Los Alamos portfolio
Dye transfer print
11 3/4 × 17 11/16in. (29.8 × 44.9cm)
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase, with funds from the Photography Committee
© Eggleston Artistic Trust, courtesy Cheim & Read, NYC

William Eggleston (America, born July 27, 1939) 'Memphis' c. 1970

William Eggleston video

“This candid interview with photographer William Eggleston was conducted by film director Michael Almereyda on the occasion of the opening of Eggleston’s retrospective William Eggleston: Democratic Camera, Photographs and Video, 1961-2008 at the Whitney Museum of American Art. A key figure in American photography, Eggleston is credited almost single-handedly with ushering in the era of colour photography. Eggleston discusses his shift from black and white to colour photography in this video as, “it never was a conscious thing. I had wanted to see a lot of things in colour because the world is in colour”. Also included in this video are Eggleston’s remarks about his personal relationships with the subjects of many of his photographs.”

The Ending of Stranded in Canton

In 1973, photographer William Eggleston picked up a Sony PortaPak and took to documenting the soul of Memphis and New Orleans. Transvestites, geek men biting off chicken heads, classy blues musicians, and crazed men with guns form the backbone of this documentary look at the “Southern Hipsters” of Louisiana and Mississippi.

Stranded in Canton

In 1973, photographer William Eggleston picked up a Sony PortaPak and took to documenting the soul of Memphis and New Orleans.

“These were the Merry Prankster and “Easy Rider” years, when road trips and craziness were cool, and Mr. Eggleston set out on some hard-drinking picture-taking excursions. He also embarked on repeated shorter expeditions closer to home in the form of epic bar crawls, which resulted in the legendary video “Stranded in Canton.”

Originally existing as countless hours of unedited film and recently pared down by the filmmaker Robert Gordon to a manageable 76 minutes, it was shot in various places in 1973 and 1974. (The new version is in the retrospective.) Mr. Eggleston would show up with friends at favourite bars, turn on his Sony Portapak, push the camera into people’s faces and encourage them to carry on.

And they did. Apart from brief shots of his children and documentary-style filming of musicians, the result is like some extreme form of reality television. Your first thought is: Why do people let themselves be seen like this? Do they know what they look like? You wonder if Mr. Eggleston is deliberately shaping some tragicomic Lower Depths drama or just doing his customary shoot-what’s-there thing, the what’s-there in this case being chemical lunacy. For all the film’s fringy charge there’s something truly creepy and deadly going on, as there is in much of Mr. Eggleston’s art. You might label it Southern Gothic; but whatever it is, it surfaces when a lot of his work is brought together.”

Holland Cotter. “Old South Meets New, in Living Color,” on The New York Times website Nov 6, 2008

William Eggleston (America, b. 1939)
Untitled
c. 1976
From Election Eve
© Eggleston Artistic Trust
Courtesy Cheim & Read Gallery

William Eggleston (American, born 1939)
Untitled (Greenwood, Mississippi)
1980
Dye-transfer print
29.6 x 45.5cm (11 5/8 x 17 15/16 in.)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Purchase, Louis V. Bell, Harris Brisbane Dick, Fletcher, and Rogers Funds and Joseph Pulitzer Bequest, and Jennifer and Philip Maritz Gift, 2012
© Eggleston Artistic Trust

William Eggleston (American, b. 1939)
Untitled
Nd
Dye-transfer print
From Los Alamos 1965-1968 and 1972-1974 (published 2003)
© Eggleston Artistic Trust

William Eggleston (American, b. 1939) 'Untitled' c. 1975 (Marcia Hare in Memphis Tennessee) c. 1975

William Eggleston (American, b. 1939)
Untitled (Marcia Hare in Memphis Tennessee)
c. 1975
Dye-transfer print
© Eggleston Artistic Trust

William Eggleston (American, b. 1939) 'Huntsville, Alabama' c. 1971

William Eggleston (American, b. 1939)
Untitled (Memphis Tennessee)
1965
Dye-transfer print
© Eggleston Artistic Trust

William Eggleston (American, b. 1939)
Untitled (Memphis)
c. 1969-1971
Dye-transfer print
© Eggleston Artistic Trust
Courtesy Cheim & Read Gallery

William Eggleston (American, b. 1939)
Untitled
1983
From a series of photographs taken at Graceland
Dye-transfer print
© Eggleston Artistic Trust
Courtesy Whitney Museum of American Art

Whitney Museum of American Art
99 Gansevoort Street
New York, NY 10014
Phone: (212) 570-3600

Opening hours:
Mon: 10.30am – 6pm
Tues: Closed
Wed: 10.30am – 6pm
Thurs: 10.30am – 6pm
Fri: 10.30am – 10pm*
Sat: 11am – 6pm
Sun: 11am – 6pm

Whitney Museum of American Art website

William Eggleston exhibition web page

LIKE ART BLART ON FACEBOOK

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