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Saturday, July 24, 2004:

I have a great admiration for William Eggleston's photographs. Right now he is probably the most interesting living photographer. And like others, I discovered his work via the cover of Big Star's "Radio City" album. Oh, a nice album as well!

Here's an interview with Eggleston in today's Guardian/Observer:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/features/story/0,11710,1268540,00.html

He's a softly spoken gentleman from the Deep South, with a taste for bourbon and antique guns and a reputation as a 'hellraiser'. He's also the photographer whose extraordinary ability to find beauty in the banal has transformed the way we look at the world. Sean O'Hagan travels to America to meet William Eggleston

Sunday July 25, 2004
The Observer

William Eggleston is not hard to spot in the lobby of the Mansfield Hotel in midtown Manhattan. Every inch a southern dandy, he stands out amid the casual wear and sombre suits, dressed in a pastel-blue summer jacket, boldly striped tie, white trousers and matching shoes. His hair is parted on the left and sweeps over a pale face that peers in perpetual suspicion from behind old-fashioned oval horn-rimmed spectacles. He looks out of place and out of time, as if he has just stepped out of a PG Wodehouse novel.

Had you to guess where he came from and what he did from his appearance alone, the words 'English' and 'aristocrat' might spring to mind way before 'American' and 'photographer'. And yet, at 65, William Eggleston is perhaps the most innovative American photographer of the past 50 years whose unique style has transformed the way we look at the world. His influence on our visually led contemporary popular culture is now so pervasive that it goes unnoticed. In fashion shoots and films, advertising and art photography, Eggleston's everyday view of things, initially dismissed by critics in the mid-Seventies, is now the prevalent aesthetic. Put simply, it would be difficult to imagine the world according to David Lynch or Gus Van Sant or Juergen Teller or Sofia Coppola without the world according to William Eggleston.

Both the opening of Lynch's Blue Velvet and Van Sant's Elephant are homages to Eggleston, the first in its use of saturated colour to highlight the surrealism of small-town America, the second a shot of a blue sky straight out of Eggleston's Wedgwood Blue series, where he pointed the camera directly up at the wispy clouds.

'It was the beauty of banal details that was inspirational,' Coppola said of Eggleston's influence on her debut feature, The Virgin Suicides, in 1999, and it is this ability to record, and illuminate, the mundane that is his stock in trade.

His most famous photograph, entitled Greenwood, Mississippi, 1973, but always referred to as The Red Ceiling, is of a bare light bulb from a crimson ceiling, three white cables snaking across the glossy surface like arteries. It is taken from an angle that suggests he may have stood on a chair, or simply held the camera above his head. In its apparent casualness, it is emblematic of Eggleston's art, being both ordinary and loaded with meaning, utterly simple and yet endlessly complex. A mundane image, maybe, yet one that carries within it some indefinable sense of menace. 'It is so powerful,' he once said, 'that I have never seen it reproduced on the page to my satisfaction. When you look at the dye transfer print, it's like red blood that's wet on the wall. It shocks you every time.'

Eggleston has travelled from his native Memphis to Manhattan to accept a lifetime achievement award from the Institute of Contemporary Photography, and the previous night he had celebrated in the company of the great Czech-born photographer Josef Koudelka, who was also honoured. Today, though, the bar is closed and, to add insult to injury, he must repair to the street every time he feels like a smoke. In person, Eggleston looks older than his 65 years, and though his reputation as a gentrified hellraiser precedes him, he comes across initially as diffident and guarded, ill-at- ease in the company of strangers, still more so with strangers who want to question him about his work. This is not what I had expected, having heard some wild stories about his legendary lifestyle.

Back in the mid-Nineties, when Primal Scream were recording their album Give Out But Don't Give Up in Memphis, they paid a call on Eggleston to ask if they could use Troubled Waters, his strange image of a neon Confederate flag and a palm tree, on the cover. 'I remember he was wearing jodhpurs and leather boots, some kind of military outfit, and walking about with a rifle and a bayonet,' recalls lead singer Bobby Gillespie. 'When he heard we were Scottish, he sat down at the piano and started reciting great chunks of Rabbie Burns. It was surreal.'

Gillespie's friend, the filmmaker Douglas Hart, takes up the story. 'William and his wife were knocking back these massive drinks. He asked us to let him hear a song, and then he would decide if we could have the picture. We played him "Moving On Up", and he fell on his knees and started shouting, "Bo Diddley! Bo Diddley! Y'all love Bo Diddley!" He rummaged through his records and pulled out "I'm the Meat Man", by Jerry Lee [Lewis] and played it so loud the speakers blew. Then his wife shouted, "Y'all want ribs?" She insisted we all go to a local rib joint. It was wild.' Gillespie nods in agreement. 'He let us have the picture though. He was a true gent.'

Today, perhaps because of his tendency to excess, Eggleston is accompanied everywhere by his son, Winston, a friendly but firm chaperone who looks after the archive and, one suspects, tries to keep his father's wilder side in check. Winston briefs the photographer and myself beforehand: the photo session must be brief, the interview should not broach the subject of specific photographs nor dwell on his private life. 'I've seen him get impatient with interviewers,' says Winston, 'and he's apt to up and leave if that occurs.'

When we are seated in a dark corner of the bar, I begin by asking Eggleston where he comes from, exactly. He stares straight ahead, as if deep in thought, then, after about 30 seconds, answers softly, 'Nowhere,' except the word comes out as three syllables - 'No-whe-ahhh' - each one enunciated in a soft southern lilt. It is not an auspicious start, but it is followed by a sly smile, then another equally long pause, after which he elaborates in what I will soon come to recognise as a typically vague manner. 'I was born on the Mississippi delta. Cotton country. Married a gal from Mississippi, too, but I've been living in or around Memphis since about 1960.'

Eggleston is the slowest and most softly spoken person I have ever met, and the silence while he considers a question is so deep and long that I find myself wondering if he has simply chosen to ignore my fumbling attempts at elucidation. His thoughts, when they emerge into speech, are expressed succinctly and in oddly illuminating phrases that, like his work, are both simple and complex. I imagine Samuel Beckett and himself would have got on famously. 'A picture is what it is,' he says when I ask him why he no longer wishes to talk about individual photographs, 'and I've never noticed that it helps to talk about them, or answer specific questions about them, much less volunteer information in words. It wouldn't make any sense to explain them. Kind of diminishes them. People always want to know when something was taken, where it was taken, and, God knows, why it was taken. It gets really ridiculous. I mean, they're right there, whatever they are.'

The 'whatever they are' aspect, one feels, is what perplexed the critics back in 1976, when Eggleston had his groundbreaking and controversial show at New York's Museum of Modern Art (Moma). Before then, colour photography was confined to advertising and product catalogues, but Eggleston hauled it, in all its saturated glory, into the rarefied world of fine art. The show and the accompanying catalogue, William Eggleston's Guide, can be seen, in retrospect, as the pivotal moment when colour photography became an art form. It was a cultural shift that enraged many contemporary critics. The New York Times called it 'the most hated show of the year', while Hilton Kramer, the most conservative and influential American critic, took issue with curator John Szarkowski's claim in the catalogue that Eggleston's photographs were 'perfect'. 'Perfectly banal, perhaps,' he wrote, 'perfectly boring, certainly.'

I ask Eggleston if he was surprised or dismayed by the negative critical response. 'Hell, no,' he says, smiling. 'It didn't surprise or offend me. Didn't impinge on me at all. I didn't think either, as some people did, that the work was revolutionary. It was certainly different to what was being done before I started, no question about that. But even if I hadn't done that show I would still have continued as normal. Wouldn't have changed a thing.'

Born in Memphis in 1939, Eggleston was raised in a grand house on a former cotton plantation amid considerable wealth and privilege, and retains the airs and graces of the old southern aristocracy. His father was killed in action during the Second World War and he was raised by his grandfather, Joseph Albert May, who pursued photography as a hobby. Eggleston attended military academy, then Vanderbilt University and 'Ole Miss' - the University of Mississippi - without ever graduating. He took up the camera reluctantly in 1957, encouraged by his best friend, who was impressed by his enthusiasm for the work of Cartier-Bresson and Walker Evans.

'I had an old Canon and a Leica,' he says, 'but I didn't know the first thing about photography. Never learnt it off anybody either. It quickly came to be that I grew interested in photographing whatever was there wherever I happened to be. For any reason.'

Does he remember the first photograph he took that he was happy with? 'First one I took,' he says, matter of factly. 'Very first one. I can remember exactly the feeling of satisfaction.' Can he recall the subject matter? 'It was an exact duplicate of the Parthenon across from the university. My friend and I walked over and I took a picture of it. Came back from the printers just how I saw it.'

By the time he arrived in New York in 1967, Eggleston had amassed a suitcase full of slides that he had taken in and around Mississippi and Tennessee over the previous few years. He trailed it around » New York, calling on like-minded souls such as Diane Arbus, Garry Winogrand and Lee Friedlander, who encouraged him to take it to John Szarkowski at Moma, perhaps the most influential curator of photography in the past century. Szarkowski saw in Eggleston what many others couldn't, or wouldn't, see - a new and radical aesthetic in the making.

In the late Sixties and early Seventies, when reportage was the dominant form, Eggleston had chosen instead to literally photograph the world around him, often in minute detail, and from what seemed at the time like skewed angles. In image after image, he had captured the old, weird America of the rural south as it merged with the vulgar new post-war America of fast food, plastic and neon. His subjects were commonplace: a muddy pick-up truck; a freezer filled with pre-packed food; discarded shoes under a bed. Sometimes he shot from below, making a child's tricycle look almost monumental; a corrugated tin roof resemble a freeway. In 1973, he discovered a process called dye-transfer printing while browsing through a commercial catalogue full of colour-saturated advertising images of perfume bottles and cigarette packets. From that moment, though his neutral gaze remained constant, everything he photographed was rendered heightened and unreal.

'He is the supreme colourist of American photography,' says British photographer Martin Parr, who acknowledges Eggleston as an influence on his own work, 'and what he was doing in the Seventies was so far ahead of the game that it was revolutionary. Photography is a generic form and there are not that many truly original artists, but Eggleston is definitely one of them.'

In 1976, Szarkowski helped Eggleston edit his already vast archive of over 2,000 photographs down to the 75 striking images that made up the Moma show. William Eggleston's Guide was, says Parr, 'lambasted at the time for being crude and simplistic, like Robert Frank's Americans before it, when in fact, it was both alarmingly simple and utterly complex. It took people a long time to understand Eggleston. Even when he had the big Barbican show over here in 1990, people were baffled, and it was considered a flop.'

The Guide was followed by other equally arresting books, including Los Alamos and The Democratic Forest. Then, in 1976, on one of his few magazine assignments, for Rolling Stone, he stopped looking through the viewfinder altogether, and began using his Leica 'like a shotgun', often shooting pictures on the move. Anything to stop becoming formulaic.

Juergen Teller pinpoints this curiously cavalier style as perhaps the key to Eggleston's singular genius. 'What has always intrigued me about Eggleston is that he seems so completely free,' says Teller. 'It's like he doesn't give a damn about anything, what people think least of all. It's almost arrogant, but it's more than that. It's a really rare thing to be that free, and you can feel it from his work.' That freedom may be tied in some way to Eggleston's wealth, to the fact that he never had to depend on anything, including photography, to earn a living. 'I guess he never had the pressure of being commercial,' continues Teller. 'He just does what he wants and it shows in the best way. It's like an intense hobby to him.' When I ask Eggleston if he considered photography to be more a hobby than a job, he nods: 'There might be something in that, all right.'

In the early Seventies, Eggleston also established a reputation as a hellraiser, hanging out with musicians and artists in Memphis's burgeoning boho scene. Around this time he shot hours of video footage on an old Sony Porta-Pak camera for a legendary lost project entitled Stranded in Canton. This, too, was an experiment in the democratic gaze, the exotic and the mundane flowing into each other, and of equal significance to Eggleston's lens. He shot day and night in juke joints, on sidewalks, in bars and fields, trailing friends as they drank and took drugs, and even capturing a travelling freak show in which two geeks bit the heads off live chickens. The hundreds of hours of footage has now finally been edited down to a manageable 85 minutes by Robert Gordon, who chronicled the local music scene in his excellent book, It Came from Memphis. 'It's black-and-white hand-held footage, mainly,' says Gordon, 'and it is shot in a form that is not dissimilar to the photographs he took at the time - impressionistic, free-form and often incredibly detailed. It's more character based, though, and many of the characters are acquaintances of Bill's, all of them sharing what you might call an extreme nature. There's a transvestite, and a veterinarian and at least two dentists. It's like the other side of the Memphis looking glass, a world fuelled by drugs, alcohol and poetic furore. Bill told me they were all using Quaaludes at the time, even the dentists. That's Memphis for you, I guess.'

Around this time, too, Eggleston also crossed paths with Alex Chilton, lead singer of Memphis rock group Big Star. The first photograph of Eggleston's I ever saw was the aforementioned red ceiling, which adorned the sleeve of Big Star's Radio City album. On a recent re-released version of Big Star's Third/Sister Lovers album, you can hear Eggleston play piano as Chilton sings a damaged version of the Nat King Cole classic, 'Nature Boy'. Another Eggleston shot of dolls arranged on the bonnet of a classic car appeared on Chilton's solo album, Like Flies on Sherbert.

'Bill used a studio round the back of Chilton's parents' house,' says Memphis musician and producer Bill Dickinson, who has played with everyone from Aretha Franklin to the Rolling Stones, and produced Big Star. 'They were artists and bohemians and their house was like a salon for local talent. The first time I saw Alex Chilton he was about 13. He was running round the lawn, eyes spinning.'

When I ask Eggleston about his involvement with the Memphis music scene, though, he shakes his head and denies any knowledge of it. 'Of no interest to me at all,' he says, in a manner that suggests this avenue of enquiry is closed. 'That's Bill to a tee,' laughs Dickinson, when I mention this. 'But he was a wild man, and still is. He wore Savile Row suits and drove a Bentley, and played classical piano, but he was more rock'n'roll than any of us, even though he probably hated the music we were making. He'd shoot with some kind of night vision lens often until the bitter end, then just fall over unconscious on the floor. He wasn't just at the party, he was the party. When he and Stanley Booth [the Memphis-based rock writer] got together, it was like World War Three.'

It was Dickinson's wife, Mary Lindsay, who first introduced Eggleston to her best friend, Lucia Birch, who, until her recent death, was his long-term lover. 'What a pair,' she says. 'She was blazing with talent. She really pushed him past his greatness.' Dickinson agrees: 'You could say they were kindred spirits. Eggleston used to turn off the lights and shoot his guns in the dark for fun. The house was riddled with holes made by $6,000 antique shotguns. It was a boredom thing. Bill is someone who gets bored easily, and he'll go to extremes not to be bored.'

During his sojourn in New York in the Seventies, Eggleston also enjoyed a long dalliance with Viva, the most beautiful of Andy Warhol's 'superstars', both of them holding court in the famed Chelsea Hotel. 'Beautiful girl,' he says. 'I still see her from time to time and we still get along real well.' I ask Eggleston how he feels when he sees himself described as a hellraiser. 'Don't care much for it,' he replies, shaking his head, 'and it usually comes from people who don't know me, so how the hell would they know? It is sometimes a little bothersome from the standpoint that it is so completely inaccurate it can get real irritating. I try not to think about it. If I did, I'd be mad all day.'

That, I would hazard a guess, would not be a pretty sight. Does he still have a fondness for guns? 'I'm fascinated by certain ones,' he says, smiling. 'Beautiful ones. Some are boring. I don't shoot that much - guns, that is.' And how would he like to be remembered? He considers this for a moment or two, then his eyes light up with a mischievous twinkle. 'As a lover,' he says.

Despite, or maybe because of, his cavalier approach to his life and his art, William Eggleston belongs to that rare and disappearing breed, the instinctive artist who seems to see into and beyond what we refer to as the 'everyday'. Often his truly great photographs are a reflection of himself, mysterious and loaded with suggestion, hinting at some darker narrative that is unfolding just out of frame. Though he rejects the notion that he has a southern sensibility, some of his best work was taken locally, and has a definite southern Gothic undertow. A hooded anorak on a bare wall calls up the spectre of the Klan, even as it mocks that same imagery. On the opposite page, a white boiler suit hangs pristine and lifeless from a tree. Nothing is set up, everything is down to his unerring instinct for the mundane and the mysterious, and his almost uncanny ability to capture the same.

'I couldn't do what that guy does', he says, after the Observer photographer, Steve Pyke, has captured his portrait. 'If I could creep up on someone, that would be different. That would be a secret photograph. Instantaneous and unrehearsed'.

When humans enter the frame, they tend to look suspiciously back at Eggleston's lens, or are blissfully unaware of it. It is often impossible to guess whether the subject is an acquaintance or a stranger. Who is the mysterious blonde woman sitting on the wall in a deserted Memphis street, looking straight at the camera, uncertain and intense? Or the girl stretched out on the sun-tinted grass as if drugged or unconscious? 'Often,' notes Teller, 'there is something morbid about his images that's mysterious and compelling, and unique to him. Everyone, including me, has at one time or another wanted to do that sort of Eggleston picture, but never succeeded. It's totally about how he sees things in his mind's eye.'

This, of course, is his singular genius, and it seems unsurprising, in retrospect, that he might wish to guard it by making it seem simple. Towards the end of the interview, I broach once again the subject of his working methods. Given his famously democratic approach, how, I wonder, does he decide what to photograph? 'I just wait until it appears,' he says, as if this were the most obvious thing in the world to do. 'Which is often where I happen to be. Might be something right across the street. Might be something on down the road. And I'm usually very pleased when I get the image back. It's usually exactly what I saw. I don't have any favourites. Every picture is equal but different.' Is it true that there are thousands of unseen William Eggleston images? 'Indeed, yes,' he nods, then leans across the table conspiratorially, 'but I've seen 'em.'

On that note, he heads out onto the street for a cigarette. When he returns, and drinks have been ordered, he looks relieved. Winston shows us his father's camera, a Leica, embossed with the name William Eggleston, and the man himself tells us he is waiting for a commission 'to come over to England to photograph the Brighton Pavilion'. Somebody please put in that call.

I ask him if he would miss taking photographs if, for some reason, he had to stop. 'Probably not,' he says, shaking his head. 'I don't have a burning desire to go out and document anything. It just happens when it happens. It's not a conscious effort, nor is it a struggle. Wouldn't do it if it was. The idea of the suffering artist has never appealed to me,' he says, smiling his childlike smile. 'Being here is suffering enough.'

Though he seems tired of talking photography, I ask him finally if there is an underlying discipline that governs his work. He shrugs. 'Let me put it this way, I work very quickly and that's part of it.

I only ever take one picture of one thing. Literally. Never two. So then that picture is taken and then the next one is waiting somewhere else.' Let me get this straight, I say, astonished: each image he has produced is the result of one single shot? He nods. And what happens, I ask, if you don't get the picture you want in that one shot? 'Then I don't get it,' he answers simply. 'I don't really worry if it works out or not.

I figure it's not worth worrying about. There's always another picture.' He makes his genius sound almost accidental, I suggest. He thinks about this for a while. 'Yes,' he nods, smiling. 'There's probably something to that. The "almost" is important, though.'

Tosh // 11:06 PM
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