Corcoran Gallery of Art to show "William Eggleston: Democratic Camera, Photographs & Video"

Written by Richard Walworrth Friday, 27 August 2010 23:30

WASHINGTON, DC - The Corcoran Gallery of Art will open William Eggleston: Democratic Camera, Photographs and Video, 1961–2008, a retrospective of images by William Eggleston (b. 1939), who pioneered a new era in color photography with his extraordinary pictures of familiar, everyday subjects. Organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art, in association with Haus der Kunst in Munich, William Eggleston: Democratic Camera is the most comprehensive exhibition of Eggleston’s work ever staged in the United States. On view June 20 – September 20, 2009 the exhibition brings together more than 150 photographs—some never-before-exhibited—made over five decades by this groundbreaking artist.

The exhibition includes Eggleston’s early, little-known black-and-white work, his rarely seen video, Stranded in Canton, and color photographs from various bodies of work, including Troubled Waters, Graceland, Los Alamos, and Election Eve, among others. The exhibition features a selection of images from his landmark solo exhibition in 1976 at the Museum of Modern Art, widely regarded as one of the most influential photography shows of its time.

When Eggleston’s color photographs were shown publicly in the 1970s, they ruptured public understanding of the medium, long-dominated by black-and-white imagery. Eggleston distinguished himself by treating color as a means of discovery and expression, and as a way to highlight aspects of lifehidden in plain sight. In his photographs, figures, places, and objects that might otherwise be disregarded as commonplace or unremarkable—such as an airplane tray table, an overstocked freezer, or a parking lot—are dominant. With a democratic and open-minded approach, he has consistently photographed daily life as though collecting fragments from his experiences. Inspired by the simplicity of snapshots and complexity of saturated colors found everywhere within his personal environment, Eggleston’s quiet, thoughtful images have profoundly impacted subsequent generations of photographers, filmmakers, and scholars.

William Eggleston: Democratic Camera is co-curated by Elisabeth Sussman, curator and Sondra Gilman Curator of Photography at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and Thomas Weski, former deputy director of Haus der Kunst in Munich, Germany, now professor of the study of curatorial cultures at the Academy of Visual Arts, Leipzig. Amanda Maddox, assistant curator of photography and media arts, is the organizing curator at the Corcoran. “Eggleston’s sense of color and composition is impeccable. His work is marked by a deep concern with equal consideration and evenhanded treatment of all his subjects. He knows and loves his terrain: the new supermarkets, sidewalks, driveways, patios, shiny cars, dinner settings, gas stations, and houses of the middle class, the interiors of elegant old Southern homes, the bars and their habitués." Sussman said.

The show begins with Eggleston’s early black-and-white photographs and covers his shift to color in the 1960s and his dye transfer prints of the 1970s and 1980s. Highlights from the last 25 years include selections from the Graceland series and The Democratic Forest, Eggleston’s anthology of the quotidian. An unparalleled chronicler of the American South, Eggleston has produced a veritable encyclopedia of the Southern vernacular. His focus has been primarily upon his native locales of Memphis and the Mississippi Delta, although his projects have taken him all over the world. By the mid-1970s, Eggleston’s color photographs garnered significant attention, particularly after The Museum of Modern Art’s photography curator John Szarkowski showed a selection of them in a landmark exhibition in 1976. This solo show at MoMA and the accompanying book, William Eggleston’s Guide, helped confirm Eggleston’s impact and influence as the leading color photographer of his day.

Speaking to Eggleston’s trademark snapshot-like approach, Weski writes in the William Eggleston: Democratic Camera catalogue: “In many of his early pictures, the observer gets the feeling that Eggleston composed the photograph only roughly and accepted everything that fell within the established frame. This approach led to prints that integrated the unpredictable into the picture and thus accepted the stroke of chance. For Eggleston, everything in front of the camera was basically worthy of a picture.”

The exhibition 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 color photographs.

ABOUT THE ARTIST
Born in 1939 in Memphis, Tennessee, and raised on his family’s cotton plantation in Mississippi, Eggleston held a more 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 color film, and eventually produced rich, vivid prints through the dye transfer process.

Eager to show his work to a broader audience, Eggleston traveled to New York with a suitcase of slides and prints to meet with MoMA curator John Szarkowski. This visit eventually yielded a controversial but revolutionary exhibition in 1976—MoMA’s first solo show to feature color photographs—and a classic accompanying book, William Eggleston’s Guide. Still a resident of Memphis, Eggleston is a prolific recorder of his birthplace, the Mississippi Delta and throughout the American South, and has photographed extensively all over the world. His stunning black-and-white video Stranded in Canton, much of it shot late at night in bars and on the streets, shows a hidden Southern subculture in a series of soliloquies and arguments.

Commissioned projects have taken Eggleston to Georgia, where he photographed future president Jimmy Carter’s hometown prior to his election in 1976, to Elvis Presley’s home at Graceland in Memphis, where he recorded the strangeness of its opulent interiors, and to Louisiana, where he documented its residents and derelict plantation houses. Collectively, his images of the South form an iconic, elegant portrait of the region. As recognition for his work increased over time, Eggleston has traveled further afield to photograph in such countries as Germany, Japan, Mexico, South Africa, England, and China. Among his many books are William Eggleston’s Guide (1976), The Democratic Forest (1989), Ancient and Modern (1992), and Spirit of Dunkerque (2008). His work has been exhibited at and collected by museums worldwide.

ABOUT THE CATALOGUE
A full-color, hardcover catalogue, William Eggleston: Democratic Camera, Photographs and Video, 1961–2008, features essays by Sussman and Weski; Whitney chief curator and associate director of programs Donna De Salvo; Whitney senior curatorial assistant Tina Kukielski; and noted American music journalist Stanley Booth. Includes an illustrated chronology, checklist of the exhibition, list of publications, selected exhibition history, selected bibliography, and index. Published by the Whitney Museum of American Art, 2008. 320 pages. $65.

ABOUT THE CORCORAN
The Corcoran Gallery of Art, a privately funded institution, was founded in 1869 as Washington’s first and largest non-federal museum of art. It is known internationally for its distinguished collection of historical and modern American art as well as contemporary art, photography, European painting, sculpture and the decorative arts. Founded in 1890, the Corcoran College of Art + Design is Washington’s only four-year college of art and design offering BFA degrees in Digital Media Design, Fine Art, Graphic Design and Photography; a five-year Bachelor of Fine Arts/ Master of Arts in Teaching (BFA/MAT); and a two-year Master of Arts (MA) in Interior Design or History of Decorative Arts. The College’s Continuing Education program offers part-time credit and non-credit classes for children and adults and draws more than 2,500 participants each year. Visit : www.corcoran.org/

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