Democratic Camera, Photographs and Video, 1961-2008
Nearly fifty years of extraordinary image-making by the
photographer William Eggleston will be presented in a major retrospective, William
Eggleston: Democratic Camera—Photographs and Video, 1961-2008, at the Whitney
Museum of American Art from Friday, November 7, 2008, through Sunday, January 25,
2009. Organized by the Whitney in association with Haus der Kunst, Munich, the exhibition
is the most comprehensive yet devoted to Eggleston in this country. It is co-curated by
Elisabeth Sussman, Whitney curator and Sondra Gilman Curator of Photography, and
Thomas Weski, deputy director of the Haus der Kunst in Munich, where the show travels
(February 20-May 17, 2009), following its Whitney debut. The exhibition’s lead sponsor is
W magazine.
William Eggleston: Democratic Camera traces the artist’s evolution from the beginnings of
his career some 50 years ago to the present day, and includes more than 150 photographs,
some never-before-exhibited, as well as the artist’s rarely screened video diary of his
legendary nocturnal wanderings, “Stranded in Canton.” A key figure in American
photography, Eggleston, who was born in 1939 in Memphis, is credited with almost single-
handedly ushering in the era of color photography. The psychological intensity of the
saturated color in Eggleston’s pictures has had an enormous impact on the entire field of
photography; as an influence, Eggleston has cited the Technicolor technique in the films of
Alfred Hitchcock.
Co-curator Elisabeth Sussman notes, “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. He
captures landscape and architecture in unexpected ways—for instance his famous view
upwards to the ceiling in a red room, or the empty space of a green tiled bathroom. And,
importantly, Eggleston, though not a portraitist in a traditional sense, has a cool, but not
uncomplicated view of the people he often photographs in these environments.”
“W magazine is extremely proud to be the lead sponsor of this exhibition at the Whitney
Museum,” says Nina Lawrence, Vice President and Publisher of W magazine. "Our
sponsorship of the Whitney exemplifies our magazine's strong editorial commitment to the
arts, and we look forward to further exciting collaborations with the Museum.”
The show begins with Eggleston’s early black-and-white photographs and covers his
groundbreaking shift to color and his dye transfer work of the early seventies. Highlights
from the last twenty 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, New Orleans,
and the Mississippi River Delta, although his commissioned projects have taken him all over
the world.
In the mid-1970s, Eggleston became famous as a photographer. His color photographs,
printed in the rich dye transfer medium, were recognized by The Museum of Modern Art’s
curator John Szarkowski, who showed them in 1976 in a historic and controversial
exhibition at the museum. With this one-person show and the accompanying book, William
Eggleston’s Guide, Eggleston emerged as the first color photographer of note in America,
the first to make color an issue in an art photography context.
Eggleston’s trademark photograph is snapshot-like. It is an intuitive response to a fleeting
configuration of elements in the tradition of Henri Cartier-Bresson, whom he greatly
admired and in whose credo of “The Decisive Moment” he has found a counterpart to his
own life’s work. As co-curator Thomas Weski writes in the exhibition 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.” Eggleston and a
friend had begun using film to document Fred McDowell, a well-known Delta blues musician,
but they 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
of friends delivered for his video camera, most often at night. The result, “Stranded in
Canton,” recently rediscovered and re-edited, is a portrait of a woozy subculture that adds
dimension and texture to the world of Eggleston’s color photographs. As Sussman writes,
“Though the epic, multi-episodic project Stranded in Canton cannot be described as a
nocturnal work in its entirety, its mood is nonetheless established by the fact that many
episodes were shot late at night. It is thus in contrast to the well-known color work, where
the powers of color and light are absolutely keyed to Eggleston’s daytime vision. In his
video work, the photographer was able to give visual shape to a demimonde in which he was
both participant and observer.”
Catalogue
The exhibition is accompanied by a full-color catalogue that provides new insight into the
ways in which Eggleston’s photography has influenced generations of American artists,
filmmakers, writers, and public perceptions of art. It includes essays by co-curators
Elisabeth Sussman and Thomas Weski; Whitney Chief Curator and Associate Director of
Programs Donna De Salvo; Senior Curatorial Assistant Tina Kukielski; and noted American
music journalist Stanley Booth. The publication includes an illustrated chronology, checklist
of the exhibition, list of publications, selected exhibition history, selected bibliography, and
index. It is co-distributed by Yale University Press.
The Curators
Elisabeth Sussman, Whitney curator and the Museum’s Sondra Gilman Curator of
Photography, recently curated the Whitney’s acclaimed exhibition Gordon Matta-Clark: You
Are the Measure. Her latest photography project was the celebrated 2003–04 Diane Arbus:
Revelations, the first retrospective of this controversial and highly influential photographer
since 1972; it opened at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), then
traveled to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and elsewhere in the U.S. and abroad,
including the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. She is currently organizing a Whitney
exhibition on Paul Thek.
Thomas Weski is deputy director of the Haus der Kunst, Munich. As chief curator there from
2003 to 2008, his exhibitions included Andreas Gursky (2007); Click Doubleclick – The
Documentary Factor (2006, in cooperation with the Palais des Beaux Arts, Brussels); and
Robert Adams: Turning Back, which received the 2005 Deutsche Börse Award. Formerly,
Weski was chief curator at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, where he was curator of the
traveling exhibition William Eggleston: Los Alamos (2003); co-curator with Emma Dexter of
Cruel and Tender: The Real in the Twentieth-Century Photograph (2003, co-organized with
Tate Modern, London); and co-curator with Heinz Liesbrock of How You Look at It:
Photographs of the Twentieth Century (2000).
Image: Untitled, 1975. Dye transfer print, 16 x 20 in. (40.6 x 50.8 cm). Cheim & Read, New York © Eggleston Artistic Trust
Organization and Funding
This exhibition was organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, in
association with Haus der Kunst, Munich.
Press contact:
Stephen Soba, Leily Soleimani Tel 212-570-3633 Fax 212-5704169 pressoffice@whitney.org
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