William Eggleston
Foundation Cartier pour l'art contemporain
[4 April - 21 June, 2009 Paris]
William Eggleston, born in 1939 in Memphis, is one of the most important contemporary American photographers. From the 1970s onwards, his work has significantly contributed to the recognition of color photography as an artistic medium. Eggleston has published his work extensively, and it has been shown in many major exhibitions around the world. He continues to live and work in Memphis, and travels considerably for photographic projects.
City homage ... Untitled, Paris series, 2006-2008
At the Cartier Foundation, you enter William Eggleston's new exhibition by descending the stairs into a big red room lit by hanging lampshades and furnished with a large leather sofa, two matching armchairs and a baby grand piano. It is a quintessentially Parisian homage to Eggleston's most famous - and strangest - photograph, Greenwood, Mississippi, 1973, otherwise known as "The Red Ceiling".
Last Wednesday evening, as the last of his photographs and drawings were being hung, Eggleston arrived at the gallery for a walkabout. Thin and dapper in a dark suit and polished Oxfords, he made straight for the baby grand and, oblivious to the flurry of activity around him and, indeed, the photographs in the adjacent gallery, sat down and started playing. For a good five minutes or so, he was utterly absorbed in the music he was making, his long, manicured fingers picking out a series of fitful, often fractured, classical extemporisations. When he finally arose, and placed an unlit cigarette in his mouth, he seemed momentarily startled by the burst of applause from those present, bowing and smiling mischievously like a surprised child.
Eggleston, as his images often attest, is a one-off, an American aristocrat from the Deep South with a wild streak and a singular ability to capture in his colour photographs all the often overlooked beauty, strangeness and intensity of the commonplace. His groundbreaking work from the early 70s, collected in books such as William Eggleston's Guide and The Democratic Forest, confused people at first with its capturing of what might be called the heightened mundane, but he is now regarded as the maverick genius who made colour photography the serious art form it is today. Eggleston is, among other things, a supreme colourist. The saturated intensity of those early photographs has given way to a more muted approach of late, but he retains an unerring ability to render the everyday surprising and sometimes surreal.
As he approaches his 70th birthday, Eggleston has finally turned his "democratic" gaze on Paris, perhaps the city that has been most iconised through photography. Three years ago, the Fondation Cartier commissioned him to photograph the city, which he has been doing ever since on regular extended trips from his native Memphis. "I'm taking over where Atget left off," he tells me, laughing. Eggleston's Paris, though, is perhaps as far away from Atget's Paris - or Cartier-Bresson's Paris or Brassaï's Paris - as one could imagine. It is, in fact, closer to Eggleston's Memphis, in so far as it emerges as a place that is both oddly recognisable and utterly alien. "I approached it and am still approaching it as if it is just anywhere," he says in the exhibition guide. "You're not quite sure: is this Paris, Mexico City, elsewhere?"
With Eggleston, though, it is nearly always elsewhere. And yet, Paris - or Parisness - leaks into these images in the most mundane ways. His image of the Bastille is taken from what looks like a wall mural of the same. Silhouetted, it looks like a mosque, the unreal sky around it covered in a graffiti scrawl. His photograph of the famous brasserie la Rotonde shows it empty and gutted, surrounded by metal shutters, awaiting a makeover. In another image that plays with the visual iconography of the city, he frames a stack of chrome chairs outside a cafe, their purple fabric matching the even more lurid tones of a film poster for Batman, le défi
Eggleston's Paris is a messy, often makeshift place - who else would be drawn to the milky water in a cement mixer? - which could indeed be any early 21st-century city. Graffiti is a recurring motif - on walls, vehicles, windows, billboards. He is drawn, too, to the garish - the hyper-bright colours of a children's funfair ride, the unreal pinks and yellows of neon shop signs. The quotidian sublime is glimpsed too, though, in the mossy green haze of street light reflected on a wet pavement or the familiar blue sky, clear and clean, that appears above buildings and treetops throughout his work. Not for the first time I was left wondering whether Eggleston possesses some innate ability to tap into that soft, opaque, unreal otherworld that the rest of us glimpse only in moments of intoxication or chemical realignment. Is he always elsewhere?
One or two of these new images contain echoes of earlier photographs, his own and other peoples. A row of teddy bears in a Parisian shop window recalls the row of dolls on a car bonnet that he shot in Memphis in the early 70s. (It was used on the album cover of Like Flies on Sherbert by Alex Chilton, another Memphis maverick.) A polythene bag packed with used paper cups recalls Robert Frank's photograph of a polythene bag packed with dolls' heads. Eggleston's eye for the heightened mundane may have mellowed of late - there is nothing here as ominous as "The Red Ceiling" or as deathly as, say, his portrait of a pale young woman lying prone on the grass, holding a camera - but he still goes his own way when it comes to composition. He famously only ever photographs a subject once, and his "shotgun" approach whereby a subject is targeted, then shot, accounts for the odd angles and seemingly off-kilter point of view. The shot of a young girl's outstretched leg is pure Eggleston. It is a portrait of sorts - her red shoe, the comic resting on her knee, the sense of childhood reverie caught, too, in that outstretched leg - even though he has done nothing as obvious as training the camera on her face.
At the Fondation Cartier you can also see a series of Eggleston's drawings, busy, colourful abstracts that nod to Kandinsky. They are what they are: involved, often intricate, doodles in pen that seem like spontaneous explorations of colour. Some of them have been placed alongside photographs and sometimes the juxtaposition works. More intriguingly, though, many of the photographs themselves tend towards the abstract in their arrangement of shapes and colours. That suggests that Eggleston, as he enters old age, may have found yet another way of seeing the everyday anew.
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 color 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.William Eggleston, Paris
A book created specially by William Eggleston on the occasion of the exhibition, which presents his photographs next to his drawings, published for the first time.Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain
Paris
Steidl, Göttingen
Hardback, 22 x 28 cm, 184 pages,
70 color photographs,
50 drawings
Steidl, Göttingen
An exceptional limited edition of 100 books in a box set,
numbered and signed by the artist
