Photography History @ Phillips' Photographs Auction including HIGH VOLTAGE: Contemporary Photographs from the Collection of Fred and Laura Bidwell

Phillips' Photographs Auction

Phillips New York

11 October 2023 10am & 2pm EDT

William Eggleston

Memphis, circa 1969

Estimate $250,000 - 350,000

Photograph Courtesy Phillips

Phillips’ 11 October Photographs auction will present an exceptional selection of work across the history of the medium, including the special single-owner sequence HIGH VOLTAGE: Contemporary Photographs from the Collection of Fred and Laura Bidwell. Offering over 300 lots, the sale features some of the most desirable classic photographers, such as William Eggleston, Ansel Adams, Richard Avedon, Dorothea Lange, Edward Steichen, and many others, as well as numerous contemporary practitioners, among them Hiroshi Sugimoto, Laurie Simmons, Zanele Muholi, Gillian Wearing, and Anne Collier. Also on view will be Inside the Photograph: Further Selections from the Peter C. Bunnell Collection, Phillips’ final online sale from the collection of this esteemed curator and photographic historian which opens for bidding on 10 October.

Vanessa Hallett, Deputy Chairwoman, Americas and Worldwide Head of Photographs said, “The wide range of works in this sale allow us the opportunity to see that the creative continuum of photography remains unbroken, and that truly expressive and creative work is present throughout the medium’s timeline. Collectors will have ample opportunity to compete for stellar works, whether their collecting focus is contemporary, Modern, or 19th century. We look forward once again to welcoming photography lovers to our pre-sale exhibition and our live auction.”

Leading the auction is William Eggleston’s iconic Memphis, 1969, his classic study of a tricycle that was the cover illustration for his seminal 1976 monograph William Eggleston’s Guide.  Presented here as a rare dye-transfer print, Memphis monumentalizes its subject, and is exemplary of William Eggleston’s unique ability to utilize color to portray the American cultural landscape. 

Ansel Adams

Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico, 1941

Estimate $100,000 - 150,000

Photograph Courtesy Phillips

Ansel Adams’s classic study of the Western American landscape, Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico, 1941, presents an especially nuanced example of this famous image. Printed in the early 1960s, this is one of the comparatively few examples of Moonrise made before the 1970s and shows Ansel Adams working at the peak of his abilities as a printer.

Edward Steichen

Radio City and Rockefeller Center, 1933

Estimate $80,000 - 120,000

Photograph Courtesy Phillips

Edward Steichen’s likely unique mural-sized multiple-exposure Radio City and Rockefeller Center, 1933, captures the soaring architecture of New York City in a dynamic abstract composition. This monumental photograph is a rare survivor from the brief period in the 1930s when Edward Steichen experimented with printing his images in increasingly larger sizes for a number of exhibition projects. Measuring roughly 50 by 40 inches, Edward Steichen’s mural is charged with the unique energy of the city.

Richard Avedon

Bob Dylan, Singer, New York, New York, 2.10.65, 1965

Estimate $20,000 - 30,000

Photograph Courtesy Phillips

Diane Arbus and Richard Avedon, two of the great portrait photographers of the 20th century, are well represented in the auction. A lifetime print of Diane Arbus’s Boy with a straw hat waiting to march in a pro-war parade, N.Y.C., 1967, is one of the photographer’s best known images and was featured on the cover of Artforum magazine in 1971. Taken at a demonstration on the streets of New York City, Diane Arbus’s incisive portrait shows a young man whose visible support of the Vietnam War was in contrast to the overall ethos of his generation. Richard Avedon’s portrait of Bob Dylan, Singer, New York, New York, 2.10.65, 1965, shows the musician as a cosmopolitan sophisticate posing along Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue. The sale also includes Richard Avedon’s elegant fashion studies, Suzy Parker, Evening dress by Dior, Paris studio, August, 1956, and Carmen, Homage to Munkácsi, Coat by Cardin, Place François-Premier, Paris, August, 1957, as well as several other portraits.

Irving Penn

Four Lipsticks (New York), 1987

Estimate $40,000 - 60,000

Photograph Courtesy Phillips

Irving Penn’s masterful color work includes his excellent cosmetic still life Four Lipsticks (New York), 1987, as well as Contact Lens, New York, 1981, and Red Lips, New York, 2005, all of which show Irving Penn’s elegant and sometimes mischievous approach to photographing fashion and beauty.

Dorothea Lange

Migratory Cotton Picker, Eloy, Arizona, 1940

Estimate $40,000 - 60,000

Photograph Courtesy Phillips

The sale also boasts a strong selection of work from the 1930s and 1940s including Dorothea Lange’s classic The Road West, New Mexico, 1938, depicting the measureless expanse of highway traversed by American migrants as they made the arduous journey from the dustbowl to California. Dorothea Lange’s Migratory Cotton Picker, Eloy, Arizona, 1940, is a penetrating portrait of one such worker, and Mission District Firetrap, San Francisco, 1936, illustrates her ability to create tightly composed images that transcend their documentary purpose. Also featured are several early works by Walker Evans, Alma Lavenson, and Berenice Abbott.

Hiroshi Sugimoto

Opticks 161, 2018

Estimate $100,000 - 150,000

Photograph Courtesy Phillips

Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Opticks 161, 2018, grew out of the photographer’s deep interest in the science of light. To make this image, Sugimoto transformed his studio into a camera obscura; as the sun rose and set outside, pure light, in all its infinite colors, was cast from a prism onto a customized mirror and then captured by Hiroshi Sugimoto’s lens, creating the stunningly saturated image offered here. This body of work debuted in 2020, and this is the first print from the project to be offered at auction.

Robert Mapplethorpe

Hyacinth, 1987

Estimate $20,000 - 30,000

Photograph Courtesy Phillips

Peter Beard

Ele Portfolio, 1965-1984

Estimate $80,000 - 120,000

Photograph Courtesy Phillips

Laurie Simmons

Walking Purse, 1989

Estimate $50,000 - 70,000

Photograph Courtesy Phillips

The October auction features a range of work by Robert Mapplethorpe including Hyacinth, 1987, a large-format photogravure on silk that makes elegant use of its materials, as does his Tulips, a platinum print also from 1987. Peter Beard’s Ele Portfolio, published in 2008, contains 15 of the photographer’s most seminal photographs of African elephants, a subject central to his body of work. Laurie Simmons’s Walking Purse, 1989, is one of the definitive images of her career and embodies the conceptual photographer’s multi-layered commentary on consumerism in popular culture.

An-My Lê

Manning the Rail, USS Tortuga, Java Sea, 2010

Estimate $15,000 - 25,000

Photograph Courtesy Phillips

Significant contemporary offerings include An-My Lê’s Manning the Rail, USS Tortuga, Java Sea, 2010, from the photographer’s extended pictorial investigation into the effects of American’s foreign policy, as well as work by Gillian Wearing, Sohei Nishino, Ryan McGinley, Wolfgang Tillmans, and Erwin Olaf.

Phillips’ 11 October Photographs auction includes the special single-owner sequence HIGH VOLTAGE: Contemporary Photographs from the Collection of Fred and Laura Bidwell to be featured in a dedicated section within the auction. The offering includes 40 works showcasing the diversity of contemporary photography with artists such as Kehinde Wiley, Dawoud Bey, Zanele Muholi, Hank Willis Thomas, Andrew Moore, Lee Friedlander, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, and many others. Collectors and philanthropists, Fred and Laura Bidwell founded the Transformer Station in the Hingetown neighborhood of Cleveland, Ohio, that has become a premier exhibition space for contemporary photography and art. High Voltage offers a glimpse into the Bidwells’ collection and exhibition program at the Transformer Station. The Bidwells gifted the Transformer Station to the Cleveland Museum of Art earlier this year. Proceeds from the works in Phillips’ auction will support the Bidwells’ active philanthropic endeavors.

Andrew Moore

The Rouge, Dearborn, Michigan from Detroit Disassembled, 2008

Estimate: $25,000 - 35,000

Photograph Courtesy Phillips

Lee Friedlander

New York City, 1966

Estimate: $4,000 - 6,000

Photograph Courtesy Phillips

Fred Bidwell said, “Laura and I are excited to show a slice of our collection and give an opportunity for other collectors to be a part of the lifecycle of these incredible photographs that we’ve loved throughout the years. Photography has never lost its fascination for the two of us with its unique ability to capture a moment of reality and time. Our collecting journey was always about the things we loved, that lightning strike moment when you see something that resonates so clearly within you. That energy is felt throughout these works, the tension between the material and the conceptual being felt in each piece, and it is our hope that this energy can go on to capture the minds of others as they did for us.”

Hiroshi Sugimoto

HIGH VOLTAGE: Contemporary Photographs from the

Collection of Fred and Laura Bidwell

Lightning Fields 128, 2009

Estimate $40,000 - 60,000

Photograph Courtesy Phillips

Central to the collection is Hiroshi Sugimoto’s monumental Lightning Fields 128, which transforms raw electrical energy into photographic form. The series has its origins in the photographer’s fascination with 18th and 19th century experiments with electricity and reflects Sugimoto’s deep knowledge of photographic history and technique. The Lightning Fields photographs are made without a camera in the darkroom, and electricity is both the source of illumination and the ‘object’ whose form is captured photographically. Rendered here in a bravura large-format print, the image delivers a distinct visual charge and, as such, was foundational at the Bidwells’ Transformer Station exhibition space.

Zanele Muholi

Bona, Charlottesville (9781), 

from Somnyama Ngonyama, 2015

Estimate $20,000 - 30,000

Photograph Courtesy Phillips

Zanele Muholi’s Bona, Charlottesville (9781) is a key example from their Somnyama Ngonyama (Hail the Dark Lioness) series. In this celebrated body of work, Zanele Muholi occupies the role of both subject and image-maker in a way that is distinctly their own, challenging stereotypes and provoking the viewer to reconsider expectations about beauty and societal roles. A major survey of Zanele Muholi’s work is planned for 2024-25 at the Tate Modern.

Hank Willis Thomas

Baron of the Crossroads, 2012

Estimate $25,000 - 35,000

Photograph Courtesy Phillips

Baron of the Crossroads, from Hank Willis Thomas’s signature Crossroads series, explores the complexities and ambiguities of race. The image features fellow artist Sanford Biggers in the character of Elegba, the Yoruba deity, trickster, and protector of travels and crossroads. In Hank Willis Thomas’s rendering, the Baron is both black and white simultaneously—neither wholly one or the other, and seemingly possessing the attributes of darkness and light. With his use of a selectively-filtering film laminate called Lumisty, Hank Willis Thomas intensifies the experience of looking at the work which shifts as the viewer changes position. Earlier this month Hank Willis Thomas was awarded the prestigious 2023 United States Department of State Medal of Arts.

Dawoud Bey

Untitled #25 (Lake Erie and Sky) from

Night Coming Tenderly, Black, 2017

Estimate $20,000 - 30,000

Photograph Courtesy Phillips

Dawoud Bey’s evocative study of Lake Erie enshrouded by darkness is from the photographer’s 2017 Night Coming Tenderly, Black series, a project commissioned by FRONT International and headed by Fred Bidwell. Shot exclusively in Cleveland and Hudson, Ohio, Dawoud Bey recreates the experience of fugitive slaves as they made their way along the Underground Railroad to freedom in Canada prior to the Civil War. Lake Erie would have been the last obstacle that many escaped slaves encountered.

Matthew Brandt

Big Bear, CA A2, 2012

Estimate: $8,000 - 12,000

Photograph Courtesy Phillips

Todd Hido

Excerpts From Silver Meadows, circa 2013 

Estimate $12,000 - 18,000

Photograph Courtesy Phillips

The Bidwells’ have long been intrigued by photographic works that are unique, and this theme is prevalent throughout the lots on offer. This includes fellow Ohioan, Todd Hido’s unique assemblage, Excerpts from Silver Meadows (exhibited at Transformer station in 2014), and works by Adam Fuss, Richard Learoyd, Chris McCaw, Alison Rossiter, Matthew Brandt, Christopher Bucklow, and multi-disciplinary artist Wilmer Wilson IV. Wilson’s Rate Who Rate You, 2016, will be his auction debut. Whether unique or editioned, each work from the Bidwell collection is arresting, appealing and High Voltage – speaking to the couple’s personal background in advertising, their impactful vision, and dedicated focus on living artists.

Hendrik Kerstens

Shopping Bag, 2008

Estimate: $20,000 - 30,000

Photograph Courtesy Phillips

Paul Mpagi Sepuya

Darkroom Mirror Study, or Aperture (0X5A3449), 2017

Estimate: $7,000 - 9,000

Photograph Courtesy Phillips

Following the sale on 11 October, a select offering from the Bidwell Collection will also be included in the April 2024 Photographs auction.

Fred Bidwell serves as Executive Director for FRONT International. Launched in 2018, FRONT International: Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art is a free, public, contemporary art exhibition comprising artist commissions, performances, films, and public programs that takes place across Cleveland, Akron, and Oberlin every three years. The third edition of FRONT will take place in 2025.

Sarah Krueger, Head of Photographs, New York, said, "Phillips is honored to work with Fred and Laura Bidwell. Through their important work with Transformer Station and FRONT International, they have pushed the boundaries of photography in the public sphere, enriching the cultural landscape and providing access to the best of contemporary photographic practice in the Midwest and beyond. The Bidwells’ vision and support have enabled the photography community to flourish, fostering creativity and innovation. Their enduring passion for this extraordinary medium leaves an indelible mark, inspiring future generations of photographers and enthusiasts."

PHILLIPS NEW YORK 

432 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10022

www.phillips.com

William Eggleston & John McCracken @ David Zwirner, NYC - True Stories

William Eggleston and John McCracken 

True Stories 

David Zwirner, New York 

Through April 17, 2021 

David Zwirner, New York, 2021 

William Eggleston and John McCracken: True Stories 

Installation view. Courtesy David Zwirner 

David Zwirner presents an exhibition of works by William Eggleston and John McCracken—the first time these two iconic American artists have been featured together. On view at the gallery’s East 69th Street location in New York,  True Stories places William Eggleston and John McCracken into dialogue around their expressive use of color and light, and their distinct versions of American vernacular culture.

Born within five years of one another—McCracken in Berkeley, California, in 1934, and Eggleston in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1939—the two artists came of age outside of the dominant centers of the art world, internalizing the spaces and light of the American West and South. Working in sculpture and photography, respectively, each would go on to break with the practices of their contemporaries and challenge the traditional boundaries of their media in search of a new form of expression. 

Though both artists occupy singular positions within the recent history of American art, they find common ground in their sharp formal sensibilities and distinctive eye for color. McCracken is known for his work that melds the restrained formal qualities of minimalist sculpture with a unique West Coast sensibility expressed through color, form, and finish. For McCracken, color was an integral element of his practice, and he considered similar or even identical forms executed in differing hues to be entirely individuated artworks that engage with their surroundings in a distinct way.

Considered the father of modern color photography, Eggleston elevated the medium to the art form that it is recognized as today. Eggleston’s novel pictorial style deftly combines vernacular subject matter with an innate and sophisticated understanding of color, form, and composition. Like McCracken, Eggleston recognized the psychological charge of color and his skilled use of it, along with his democratic and indiscriminate lens, would set him apart from his contemporaries.  

Both Eggleston and McCracken privileged a way of making art that championed an open relationship to their viewers. Through their own unique visions, both artists eschew fixed meaning, emphasizing the subjective experience of the viewer and granting us access to a private world in which we might recognize a wider one. While formally reductive in their simplified geometric shapes, McCracken’s luminous surfaces are emblematic of a distinctive West Coast approach to minimalism. Unlike his East Coast contemporaries, who considered their own reductive forms to be entirely nonreferential and self-contained, McCracken thought of his work more expansively and in relation to the subjective experience of each viewer and often referred to them as “structural essences of the man-made world.”1 As art historian and curator Robin Clark notes, “In addition to likening them to humans, McCracken described his slotted sculptures prosaically as ‘two-sided, front and back. Like people, buildings, houses, cabinets, refrigerators, ovens, hi-fi, electrical components, cars & trucks, safes, heaters, display cases etc.,’ and more succinctly as ‘mystery containers.’”2

Similarly, Eggleston sought to turn the ordinary into the distinctive, capturing the landscape and character of the American South in Kodachrome colors through a technical approach and visual style more often associated with the evolving snapshot aesthetic of contemporary street photography than the formalist practices of traditional fine art photographers. His images of storefronts, restaurants, homes, cars, and people of the cities, towns, and settings to which he traveled expose an architecture of surfaces in postwar America, while revealing the breadth and individuality of everyday life in often overlooked locations. As Thomas Weski notes, “Eggleston’s photographs connect apparent intimacy with the accessibility of the snapshot. At the same time they preclude a quick and unambiguous interpretation owing to their strange or unfamiliar perspective, the detail chosen, and the subjective control of color: each picture evokes, opens up, different associations for every observer.”3

When considered together, these works reveal synchronicities between their unique visions: McCracken’s pedestal works and planks can be likened to everyday objects while Eggleston’s photographs convey pure color and form. Found within McCracken’s imbued spirituality and Eggleston’s embrace of the spiritual banal are stories of the American psyche, from the heroic to the mundane. 

With a career spanning over fifty years, WILLIAM EGGLESTON (b. 1939) continues to hold a significant influence on contemporary photography and visual culture at large. His 1976 solo exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, curated by John Szarkowski, marked one of the first presentations of color photography at the museum. The show and its accompanying catalogue, William Eggleston’s Guide, heralded an important moment in the medium’s acceptance within the art-historical canon, and it solidified the artist’s position as one of its foremost practitioners to this date. 

Important solo presentations of William Eggleston’s work have been held at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, in 1990; Barbican Art Gallery, London, in 1992 (traveled to Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark; Museum Folkwang, Essen; and Fotomuseum Winterthur); documenta IX, Kassel, in 2002; and Museum Ludwig, Cologne, in 2003 (traveled to Museu Serralves, Porto; Nasjonalmuseet – Museet for samtidskunst, Oslo; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Albertina, Vienna; and Dallas Museum of Art). In 2008, a major career-spanning survey, William Eggleston: Democratic Camera, Photographs and Video, 1961–2008, was organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and Haus der Kunst in Munich; it subsequently traveled to the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Art Institute of Chicago; and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among other institutions.

More recent solo exhibitions have included those held at Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris, in 2009 (traveled to Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, and Hasselblad Foundation, Gothenburg, Sweden); The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in 2013; and Foam Fotografiemuseum, Amsterdam, in 2017. In 2018, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, presented William Eggleston: Los Alamos, a solo exhibition featuring a landmark gift to the museum by Jade Lau of the artist’s notable portfolio Los Alamos.

William Eggleston received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1975 and has been the recipient of numerous notable awards, including the International Center of Photography Infinity Award for Lifetime Achievement (2004) and the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication, République Française (Order of Arts and Letters of the French Republic) (2016), among others. The Aperture Foundation honored Eggleston in October 2016. Work by the artist is held in major international museum collections.

In 2020, William Eggleston was presented at David Zwirner Hong Kong, the artist’s debut solo presentation in Greater China. William Eggleston: The Democratic Forest, an exhibition of works drawn from the artist’s encyclopedic project, marked his first solo show at David Zwirner New York in 2016. 2 ¼, an exhibition of Eggleston’s medium-format, square photographs, was presented in 2019 at David Zwirner London.

JOHN MACCRACKEN (1934–2011) developed his early sculptural work while studying painting at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland in the late 1950s and early 1960s. While experimenting with increasingly three-dimensional canvases, the artist began to produce objects made with industrial materials, including plywood, sprayed lacquer, and pigmented resin, creating the highly reflective, smooth surfaces for which he was to become known. In 1966, McCracken generated his signature sculptural form: the plank, a narrow, monochromatic, rectangular board format that leans at an angle against the wall (the site of painting), while simultaneously entering into the three-dimensional realm and physical space of the viewer.

 

Beginning in the 1960s, John McCracken exhibited steadily in the United States and abroad, and his early work was included in groundbreaking exhibitions such as Primary Structures at The Jewish Museum, New York (1966), and American Sculpture of the Sixties at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (1967). In 1986, the major survey Heroic Stance: The Sculpture of John McCracken 1965–1986 was organized by P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City, New York, and traveled to the Newport Harbor Art Museum (now the Orange County Museum of Art), Newport Beach, California; Fine Arts Gallery, University of California, Irvine; and the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Texas. In 2011, his work was the subject of a large-scale retrospective at Castello di Rivoli, Turin. Other significant solo shows include those hosted by the Hochschule für Angewandte Kunst, Vienna (1995); Kunsthalle Basel (1995); Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Ghent (2004); Inverleith House, Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh (2009); and the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, England (2012).

 

John McCracken’s work has been prominently featured in major group exhibitions worldwide, including A Minimal Future? Art as Object 1958–1968, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2004); The Los Angeles Art Scene, 1955–1985, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (2006); documenta 12, Kassel (2007); and Time & Place: Los Angeles 1957–1968, Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2008). Additionally, the artist’s work was in three shows organized as part of the 2011 region-wide initiative Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945–1980 at the Getty Center, Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, La Jolla, California; and Pomona College Museum of Art, Claremont, California.

Work by the artist is held in prominent international collections, including the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; Art Institute of Chicago; BOZAR – Centre for Fine Arts, Brussels; Castello di Rivoli, Turin; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal; Musée d’art moderne et contemporain (MAMCO), Geneva; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Orange County Museum of Art, Santa Ana, California;; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

 

John McCracken joined David Zwirner in 1997. During his lifetime, the artist had seven solo exhibitions with the gallery in New York, including Sculpture (1997), Stainless Steel Sculptures (2000­), Early Sculpture (2005), and New Works in Bronze and Steel (2010), among others. In 2013, Works from 1963–2011, which was on view at the West 20th Street location in New York, marked the gallery’s most comprehensive presentation to date of the artist’s work. In 2017, David Zwirner presented a solo exhibition in New York of key examples from three discrete groups of McCracken’s work: leaning multipart wall pieces, wall-mounted multipart reliefs, and freestanding columns.

_______________

1 John McCracken: Sketchbook (Santa Fe: Radius Books, 2008), p. 76. 

2 Robin Clark, “John McCracken: Thresholds,” in John McCracken: Works from 1963–2011. Exh. cat. (New York: David Zwirner Books; Santa Fe: Radius Books, 2014), p. 21.

3 Thomas Weski, “‘I Can’t Fly, but I Can Make Experiments,’” in William Eggleston: Democratic Camera, Photographs and Video, 1961–2008. Exh. cat. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), p. 16.

DAVID ZWIRNER GALLERY

34 East 69th Street, New York

Appointment bookings available on davidzwirner.com

William Eggleston @ David Zwirner, London

William Eggleston: 2¼
David Zwirner, London
Through June 1, 2019

David Zwirner presents 2¼, a series of square-format colour photographs from the 1970s by American photographer William Eggleston. On view at 24 Grafton Street in London, the show marks the artist’s first presentation at the gallery’s UK location and his second solo exhibition with David Zwirner since joining the gallery, in 2016.

Over the course of nearly six decades, William Eggleston has established a singular pictorial style that deftly combines vernacular subject matter with an innate and sophisticated understanding of colour, form, and composition. His vividly saturated photographs transform the ordinary into distinctive, poetic images that eschew fixed meaning. A pioneer of colour photography, Eggleston helped elevate the medium to the art form that it is recognised to be today. He took the 2¼ photographs in California and throughout the American South following his groundbreaking solo show Color Photography by William Eggleston at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1976. Curated by John Szarkowski, this exhibition would come to herald the medium’s acceptance within the art-historical canon.

The works in the 2¼ series are notable within William Eggleston’s oeuvre for their distinct format. He shot the photographs using a two-and-one-quarter-inch medium-format camera, resulting in images that exist between the registers of portraiture and landscape, dissolving the boundaries between the two. The individuals, cars, parking lots, and local stores and businesses that the artist depicts in the series speak to the uniformity of postwar material culture while revealing the distinct character and idiosyncrasies of the people and places that populate the American landscape. Through William Eggleston’s lens, a rusted-over Cadillac dealer’s sign becomes both a potent emblem of industrial decline and a lushly toned formalist colourscape of rich blues and bronzes. Vermeer-like, William Eggleston exhibits a sensitivity to the powerful yet diffuse light that permeates these spaces. Several images from the series capture cars parked in litter-strewn lots, immersed within this special saturated glow. As Agnès Sire notes, 'The light of the South is explosive, despite being treated [by William Eggleston] in a very uncommon manner, as if cleansed of expressionistic shadows.'(1)

Many of the images in 2¼ were first published as a monograph of the same title by Twin Palms in 1999. Several were also included in Cadillac, a portfolio of thirteen chromogenic prints that William Eggleston produced the same year. The exhibition at David Zwirner follows recent presentations of the artist’s work in the UK, including William Eggleston: Portraits at the National Portrait Gallery, London, in 2016, and William Eggleston at Tate Modern, London, in 2013.

WILLIAM EGGLESTON was born in 1939 in Memphis, Tennessee, where he lives today. William Eggleston: The Democratic Forest, an exhibition of works drawn from the artist’s encyclopaedic project, marked his first solo show at David Zwirner New York in 2016.

Since the 1970s, William Eggleston’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at prominent institutions worldwide. Important solo presentations were held at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, in 1990; Barbican Gallery, London, in 1992 (travelled to Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark; Museum Folkwang, Essen; and Fotomuseum Winterthur); documenta IX, Kassel, in 2002; and Museum Ludwig, Cologne, in 2003 (travelled to Museu Serralves, Porto; Nasjonalmuseet – Museet for samtidskunst, Oslo; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Albertina, Vienna; and Dallas Museum of Art). In 2008, a major career-spanning survey, William Eggleston: Democratic Camera, Photographs and Videos 1961–2008, was organised by the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and Haus der Kunst in Munich; it subsequently travelled to the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Art Institute of Chicago; and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among others.

More recent solo exhibitions have included those held at Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris, in 2009 (travelled to Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, and Hasselblad Foundation, Gothenburg, Sweden); The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in 2013; and Foam Fotografiemuseum, Amsterdam, in 2017. In 2018, The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York presented William Eggleston: Los Alamos, a solo exhibition featuring a landmark gift to the museum by Jade Lau of the artist’s notable portfolio, Los Alamos.

William Eggleston received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1975 and has been the recipient of numerous notable awards, including the International Center of Photography Infinity Award for Lifetime Achievement (2004) and the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication, République Française (Order of Arts and Letters of the French Republic) (2016), among others. The Aperture Foundation honoured William Eggleston in October 2016. Work by the artist is held in major international museum collections.

Founded in 1992, the Eggleston Artistic Trust is dedicated to the representation and preservation of the work of William Eggleston and is directed by his sons, Winston Eggleston and William Eggleston III.

(1) Agnès Sire, ‘The Invention of Language’, in William Eggleston: From Black and White to Color. Exh. cat. (Göttingen: Steidl, 2014), p. 14.

DAVID ZWIRNER, LONDON
24 Grafton Street London, W1S 4EZ
www.davidzwirner.com

William Eggleston @ David Zwirner, NYC

William Eggleston
Selected Works from The Democratic Forest
David Zwirner, New York    
October 27 - December 17, 2016

David Zwirner presents its first exhibition with William Eggleston since having announced the gallery’s exclusive worldwide representation of the artist. On view at 537 West 20th Street in New York will be works from Eggleston’s monumental project The Democratic Forest.

Over the course of nearly six decades, William Eggleston has established a singular pictorial style that deftly combines vernacular subject matter with an innate and sophisticated understanding of color, form, and composition. His photographs transform the ordinary into distinctive, poetic images that eschew fixed meaning. His 1976 solo exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, curated by John Szarkowski, marked the first presentation of color photography at the museum. Although initially criticized for its unfamiliar approach, the show and its accompanying catalogue, William Eggleston’s Guide, heralded an important moment in the medium’s acceptance within the art historical canon, and it solidified the artist’s position as one of its foremost practitioners to this date. William Eggleston’s work continues to exert an influence on contemporary visual culture at large.

The Democratic Forest is among William Eggleston’s most ambitious projects and a prime example of his uniquely recognizable aesthetic. Likened to an epic journey or an enduring narrative, it comprises a careful selection of works from over ten thousand negatives he took in the mid-1980s across the southern and eastern parts of America and in several European countries. These photographs of rural back roads, industrial and residential environs, architectural details, restaurant interiors, and parking lots, among other locales, eluded the conventions of both reportage and the black-and-white art photography practiced by many of the artist’s peers at the time, and instead shaped their own definition of what a photographic image could be—intuitive and charged with imaginative possibilities. Collectively, the project echoes William Eggleston’s predilection for the “democratic” vision of the camera, able to render equally what is in front of the lens.

The show will include over forty works from The Democratic Forest, the majority of which have not been exhibited previously. Although taken thirty years ago, the photographs appear to cast their subjects in a timeless light. As the art historian Alexander Nemerov writes in a new catalogue published by David Zwirner Books/Steidl on the occasion of the show,

Eggleston’s work—the great flow of it— feels…impelled by the world. It feels, to put it another way, pulled along by the world, by things outside the artist, rather than compelled by something inside him….[O]ne feels him being borne along by a current… [T]he current [he] rides along is simply the proliferation of scenes—the great panoramic film strip of it, never ending in its flow of gas stations and horse buggies and parking lots and roadside trees and filigreed urns stamped in tin. But more than that…there is the feeling that the infiniteness of the world, the sheer extent of it, is its own kind of eternity.  Alexander Nemerov, “This Pretty World: William Eggleston’s Photographs,” in William Eggleston: The Democratic Forest. Selected Works. Exh. cat. (New York and Gottingen: David Zwirner and Steidl, 2016), n.p.

WILLIAM EGGLESTON was born in 1939 in Memphis, Tennessee, where he continues to live today. Raised in Sumner, Mississippi, he attended Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee; Delta State College, Cleveland, Mississippi; and University of Mississippi, Oxford.

Since the 1970s, William Eggleston’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at prominent institutions worldwide, beginning with his above-mentioned 1976 show at The Museum of Modern Art, New York (traveled to Seattle Art Museum; Santa Barbara Museum of Art; Fredrick Wright Art Galleries, University of California at Los Angeles; Reed College, Portland, Oregon; and University of Maryland Art Gallery, College Park). Subsequent important solo presentations were held at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. in 1990; the Barbican Gallery, London in 1992 (traveled to Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark; Folkwang Museum, Essen; and Fotomuseum Winterthur); documenta IX, Kassel, Germany in 2002; Museum Ludwig, Cologne in 2003 (traveled to Museu Serralves, Porto; Nasjonalmuseet – Museet for samstidkunst, Oslo; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Albertina, Vienna; and Dallas Museum of Art). In 2008, a major career-spanning survey, William Eggleston: Democratic Camera, Photographs and Videos 1961-2008 was organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and Haus der Kunst in Munich; it subsequently traveled to the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; the Art Institute of Chicago; and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

More recent exhibitions have included those held at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Tate Modern, London, both 2013; Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris, 2009 (traveled to Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; and Hasselblad Foundation, Gothenburg, Sweden, both 2010). Currently on view at the National Portrait Gallery in London is a comprehensive survey of Eggleston’s portraits (through October 23, 2016).

William Eggleston received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1975 and has been the recipient of numerous notable awards, including the University of Memphis Distinguished Achievement Award (1996); Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography (1998); International Center of Photography Infinity Award for Lifetime Achievement (2004); the Getty Images Lifetime Achievement Award (2004); and the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication, République Française (Order of Arts and Letters of the French Republic) (2016), among others. The Aperture Foundation will honor Eggleston in October 2016. Work by the artist is held in major international museum collections.

Founded in 1992, the Eggleston Artistic Trust is dedicated to the representation and preservation of the work of William Eggleston and is directed by his sons Winston Eggleston and William Eggleston III.

DAVID ZWIRNER
www.davidzwirner.com

William Eggleston: The Democratic Forest

William Eggleston
The Democratic Forest
Published by Steidl 2015

William Eggleston

The Democratic Forest

Published by Steidl 2015

Edited by Mark Holborn and William Eggleston III

Texts by Mark Holborn and Eudora Welty

Book design by Gerhard Steidl and Duncan Whyte

Following the publication of Chromes in 2011 and Los Alamos Revisited in 2012, the reassessment of William Eggleston’s career continues with the publication of The Democratic Forest, his most ambitious project. This ten-volume set containing more than a thousand photographs is drawn from a body of twelve thousand pictures made by Eggleston in the 1980s. Following an opening volume of work in Louisiana, which serves as a visual preface, the remaining books cover Eggleston’s travels from his familiar ground in Memphis and Tennessee to Dallas, Pittsburgh, Miami, Boston, the pastures of Kentucky, and as far as the Berlin Wall. The final volume leads the viewer back to the South of small towns, cotton fields, the Civil War battlefield of Shiloh and the home of Andrew Jackson, the President from Tennessee.

William Eggleston: The Democratic Forest

Volume 1 - The Louisiana Project

(c) 2015 William Eggleston for the images

Book published by Steidl 2015

William Eggleston: The Democratic Forest

Volume 1 - The Louisiana Project

(c) 2015 William Eggleston for the images

Book published by Steidl 2015

The democracy of Eggleston’s title refers to his democracy of vision, through which he represents the most mundane subjects with the same complexity and significance as the most elevated. The exhaustive editing process of The Democratic Forest—a rarely shown body of work of which only a fraction has been published to date—has taken over three years, and was guided by the belief that only on this large scale can the magnitude of Eggleston’s achievement be represented. With no precedent in American art, Eggleston’s photography seen as a whole has all the grandeur of an epic piece of fiction. The Democratic Forest includes a new introduction by Mark Holborn and the re-publication of Eudora Welty’s original essay on the work.

William Eggleston: The Democratic Forest

Volume 1 - The Louisiana Project

(c) 2015 William Eggleston for the images

Book published by Steidl 2015

William Eggleston: The Democratic Forest

Volume 1 - The Louisiana Project

(c) 2015 William Eggleston for the images

Book published by Steidl 2015

William Eggleston: The Democratic Forest

Volume 1 - The Louisiana Project

(c) 2015 William Eggleston for the images

Book published by Steidl 2015

Ten clothbound hardcovers in a box:

Vol. 1 The Louisiana Project, 96 pages, 70 color photographs

Vol. 2 The Language, 136 pages, 109 color photographs

Vol. 3 Dallas. Oil. Miami, 112 pages, 86 color photographs

Vol. 4 Pittsburgh, 144 pages, 115 color photographs

Vol. 5 Berlin, 128 pages, 96 color photographs

Vol. 6 The Pastoral, 112 pages, 81 color photographs

Vol. 7 The Interior, 112 pages, 87 color photographs

Vol. 8 The Surface, 168 pages, 129 color photographs

Vol. 9 The Forest, 152 pages, 113 color photographs

Vol. 10 The Finale, 168 pages, 124 color photographs

31.5 × 32 cm - Four-color process
€ 550.00 - ISBN 978-3-86930-792-3

Biography

WILLIAM EGGLESTON was born in 1939 and today lives in Memphis. William Eggleston is regarded as one of the greatest photographers of his generation and a major American artist, who has fundamentally changed the way the urban landscape is viewed. He obtained his first camera in 1957 and was later profoundly influenced by Henri Cartier-Bresson’s book The Decisive Moment. William Eggleston introduced dye-transfer printing, a previously commercial photographic process, into the making of artists’ prints. His exhibition “William Eggleston’s Guide” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1976 was a milestone. He was also involved in the development of video technology in the seventies. William Eggleston’s work is represented in museums across the world, and in 2008 a retrospective of his work was held at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and at Haus der Kunst in Munich in 2009.

THE DEMOCRATIC FOREST by WILLIAM EGGLESTON is published by Steidl : www.steidl.de

Everything was moving: Photography from the sixties and seventies at Barbican Art Gallery, UK

Everything was moving: Photography from the 60s and 70s 
Barbican Art Gallery, London
13 September 2012 - 13 January 2013

I love all art medium but it is always a pleasure to share inforations about a major photography exhibition. This one is particulary interresting because it surveys the medium from an international perspective, and includes renowned photographers from across the globe, all working during two of the most memorable decades of the 20th Century. everything was moving: photography from the 60s and 70s tells a history of photography, through the photography of history. It brings together over 350 works, some rarely seen, others recently discovered and many shown in the UK for the first time.

It features key figures of modern photography including Bruce Davidson, William Eggleston, David Goldblatt, Graciela Iturbide, Boris Mikhailov and Shomei Tomatsu, as well as important practitioners whose lives were cut tragically short such as Ernest Cole and Raghubir Singh. Each contributor has, in different ways, advanced the aesthetic language of photography, as well as engaging with the world they inhabit in a profound and powerful way.

The exhibition is set in one of the defining periods of the modern age – a time that remains an inescapable reference point even today. The world changed dramatically in the 1960s and 1970s, shaped by the forces of post-colonialism, and Cold War neo-colonialism. This momentous epoch in history coincided with a golden age in photography: the moment when the medium flowered as a modern art form.

Great auteur photographers emerged around the ‘developed’ and the ‘developing’ world. Many, working increasingly independently from the illustrated press, and freed from the restraints of brief and commission, were able to approach the world on their own terms, and to introduce a new level of complexity to photographic imagery. Others, such as Li Zhensheng (China) and Ernest Cole (South Africa), found themselves living in situations of extreme repression, but devised inspiring strategies to create major works of photography in secrecy and at huge personal risk.

Back in the 1960s, many commentators viewed photography as inferior to painting or sculpture, because it simply recorded, mechanically, what could be seen, and was judged to be concerned primarily with reporting the facts (journalism) or campaigning for change (social documentary). Attitudes changed during this period, and the art museum slowly opened its doors to the medium. Less concerned to change the world, or to merely describe it, a new generation of photographers were driven to understand that world, as well as their place within it.

The exhibition presents a selection of works by the Chinese photographer, Li Zhensheng, some never before revealed in public. An aspiring artist and filmmaker, Li Zhensheng worked throughout the tumultuous decade of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) for the Heilongjiang Daily, the local newspaper of Harbin in the far North East of China, on the border with Russia. He, like everyone else in the country found himself caught up in the mad spiral of indoctrination and violence that was Mao’s ‘revolution’– at times as a participant, at others as a victim. At great personal risk, Li Zhensheng photographed in secret, and then buried those photographs, some 30,000 negatives, under his mud floor. The material only came fully to light in the West at the end of the 20th century. It is the most complete visual record known of this extraordinary period of human history.

In a very different response to totalitarianism, acclaimed conceptual photographer, Boris Mikhailov lived and worked in Kharkhov at the height of Soviet domination of the Ukraine. Boris Mikhailov developed a distinctive artistic approach, with which to evade the censors and to satirize Soviet occupation, as well as the tenets of socialist realism. The exhibition includes the first UK showing of his very first series, Yesterday’s Sandwich, 1968-1975, a collection of radical, often hilarious montages.

A pioneer of colour, Indian artist Raghubir Singh (1942-1999) was driven to create a photography that was emphatically modern and Indian. He broke abruptly with the colonial tradition of single-point perspective, picturesque, depopulated landscapes – to describe an India which was peopled, frenetic and luminous. His so-called theory of ‘Ganges modernism’ pitted colour and spirituality against the monochromatic angst and alienation of Western figures such as Robert Frank and Diane Arbus. The work of Raghubir Singh has never been thoroughly evaluated in the UK, and this selection includes rarely seen images from the extraordinary archives of the early part of his career.

In stark contrast to Raghubir Singh’s colourful exuberance, an unrelentingly black-and-white aesthetic emerged in Japan, exemplified by the work of Shomei Tomatsu who is widely considered the ‘godfather’ of modern Japenese photography and a major influence on Daido Moriyama. In Shomei Tomatsu’s first-ever British museum showing, life in 1960s and 1970s Japan is evoked in metaphoric, angry, uncompromisingly monochrome pictures. Shomei Tomatsu rails against continuing American military occupation at Okinawa (the base from which Vietnam was being bombed); the growing impact of American capitalism on Japenese culture; and the devastating psychological legacy of Nagasaki.

Where most of Africa was – in theory at least – liberated from colonial domination by the early 1960s, in South Africa, a government – inspired by Nazi Germany and ignored by the West – was starting to build its heinous apartheid regime. Across the Atlantic, in another society dominated by white racism and racial segregation, the Southern states of America saw the stirrings of change as the civil rights movement gathered pace. The struggle for civil rights –from Selma to Soweto, the Amazon to Londonderry – was to define the spirit of the times: as did an increasingly angry global opposition to the neo-colonial war that America was waging in Vietnam.

Johannesburg-based David Goldblatt, is, perhaps more than any other photographer since Eugène Atget, linked inextricably with the country of his birth. Over five decades, David Goldblatt has created arguably one of the most important bodies of documentary photography in the history of the medium. He has forged a complex, contradictory tableau of South Africa’s fractured society, during and after apartheid. For this exhibition, David Goldblatt has personally revisited his major series of the 1960s and 1970s, from On the Mines with Nadine Gordimer, to Some Afrikaners Photographed, and In Boksburg. The selection includes rarely exhibited works.

Long thought lost for ever, an incredible collection of vintage prints by the black South African Ernest Cole (1940-1990) was recently rediscovered and will be shown for the first time in Britain at Barbican Art Gallery. Ernest Cole somehow persuaded the Race Classification Board that he was not ‘black’ but ‘coloured’ (he changed his name from Kole to Cole) and was therefore able to practice as a photographer at a time when many black photographers were persecuted and imprisoned. Ernest Cole’s courage and determination were matched by his artistic talent. He escaped South Africa on 9 May 1966, and in exile in New York was to publish House of Bondage, 1967, an indelible record of what it was to be black under apartheid. Ernest Cole was never able to return home and he died in poverty, his negatives given away, it is believed, in lieu of an unpaid hotel bill.

South Africa ’s extraordinary tradition of realist photography during this period is contrasted with major American contemporaries. Bruce Davidson and William Eggleston are two of the giants of 20th century photography. In many ways, they are diametrically opposed in philosophy and approach, and yet at points in the 1960s they shared subject matter: both were photographing people and places in the contested landscape of the Southern states as the struggle for equality unfolded.

Time of Change, 1961-1965, one of Bruce Davidson’s most powerful series, has never been exhibited in the UK. On May 25, 1961 the 28-year old photographer joined a group of Freedom Riders making a terrifying journey by bus from Montgomery, Alabama to Jackson, Mississippi. It was the starting point of a four-year project for Bruce Davidson, in which he captures the mood and the events of the civil rights struggle, in a series of poignant and empathetic pictures. Where Bruce Davidson was interested in the human reality of the south, in contrast, William Eggleston, a native of Memphis, Tennessee, perplexed the critics with his seeming lack of subject matter, lack of composition - and lack of a photographic agenda. Now, he is widely viewed as a brilliant innovator who revolutionized photography with his ‘democratic’, non-hierarchical vision, his ‘shotgun’ aesthetic and his radical use of colour. William Eggleston’s classic pictures of the period – affectless, brooding images of the Deep South, saturated in vivid colour, and shot through with a sense of menace, equally conjure the mood of the time.

Also included: major contributions by Hasselblad-award winners Graciela Iturbide (Mexico) and Malick Sidibé (Mali); a little-seen allegorical work by Sigmar Polke (Germany) ; and a selection of Larry Burrows’ (UK) powerful Vietnam portraits.

Kate Bush, Head of Art Galleries, Barbican Centre, said:

I am delighted to bring together an amazing group of photographers whose striking and powerful images of the 1960s and 1970s make us look at the world again. everything was moving explores a spectrum of different photographic approaches, and asks if, in the early 21st century, we are finally prepared to erase the distinction between art photography and documentary photography.

This exhibition is supported by The Japan Foundation, Institut Français, The Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation and The Nehru Centre.

Art Gallery, Barbarican Centre's website: www.barbican.org.uk

William Eggleston: Anointing the Overlooked at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts, Nashville

William Eggleston: Anointing the Overlooked 
Frist Center for the Visual Arts, Nashville
January 21 – May 1, 2011 

WILLIAM EGGLESTON: ANOINTING THE OVERLOOKED is an exhibition bringing together recent works and iconic photographs by one of today’s most renowned photographers, William Eggleston. The exhibition, originated by the Frist Center for the Visual Arts, includes 50 photographs by the Memphis, tennessee, resident who is one of the most influential artists of his generation. Included in the exhibition are selections from the permanent collection of the Memphis Brooks Museum, Cheim & Read Gallery, New York, with the assistance of the Eggleston Artistic Trust, and the David Lusk Gallery, Memphis, ephemera objects and the continuous screening of the renowned 2007 documentary By the Ways: A Journey with William Eggleston, directed by Vincent Gérard and Cédric Laty. 

In conjunction with the exhibition, the Frist Center will also present a film series, The Strangeness of the Ordinary, featuring films by David Lynch, Gus Van Sant and Sofia Coppola, directors who have been influenced by Eggleston’s aesthetic innovations. 

William Eggleston was a key figure in legitimizing color photography as an artistic medium. By not censoring, rarely editing, and photographing the seemingly forgettable, Eggleston reminds audiences of the inherent democratic uses of photography and our widespread access to it. 

“What distinguishes Eggleston as an artist is his uncanny ability to capture everyday scenes or objects without slipping into sentimentality or nostalgia,” says Dr. Susan Edwards, Executive Director and CEO of the Frist Center. “His photographs are familiar yet nonspecific, compelling in their simplicity and intriguing by virtue of their understatement.” 

WILLIAM EGGLESTON, BIOGRAPHY - Born in Memphis, Tenn., in 1939 at the end of the Great Depression, William Eggleston spent most of his formative years moving back and forth between Tennessee and Mississippi. As a child, Eggleston was interested in painting and audio technology. Since turning to photography, he has been a remarkable chronicler of a culture that was being transformed by racial integration, air conditioning, strip malls, shopping carts and fast-food chain restaurants. While rooted in a specific place and time, Eggleston’s depictions of these transformations have a universal resonance that continues today, when our realities continue to show themselves to be in a constant state of flux. 

Although he attended Vanderbilt University, Delta State College and the University of Mississippi, Eggleston never received a college degree. However, it was during this time that his interest in photography took root. William Eggleston was given a Leica camera by a friend at Vanderbilt. While studying art at Ole Miss, he was introduced to abstract expressionism by a visiting New York painter, Tom Young. 

In 1976, William Eggleston exhibited his works in the first solo exhibition of color photography at the Museum of Modern Art –MoMA– in New York. Color Photographs by William Eggleston, and its accompanying publication, William Eggleston’s Guide (after the Michelin Guide), caused something of a sensation among museum visitors and critics who found Eggleston’s use of color garish and his seemingly offhand approach antithetical to their expectations of art photography, which at the time was dominated by black and white images, printed in darkrooms as a sign of authorship and authenticity. 

Colors in William Eggleston’s early prints were intensified by the dye-transfer process, a printing technique developed by Kodak in the 1940s in which a succession of three color separations produces richly saturated and color-stable prints. Once prevalent in advertising and fashion photography, Kodak’s dye-transfer technique allowed the artist to not only paint or direct the intensity of color in his prints, but also to mingle art and commerce. 

William Eggleston has frequently produced groups of photographs as cohesive units, either as a series made at a specific site for a project or for a commission. Included in Anointing the Overlooked are seven photographs reproduced in William Eggleston’s Guide, among them the iconic Untilted Memphis Tricycle (ca. 1971). Selections from two series of the early 1980s, The Southern Suite and Troubled Waters, are also included in the exhibition. Finally, a large group of rarely seen photographs made after 2000 reveals Eggleston’s continued interest in showing the everyday in a new light. These later works amplify the sharp colors and limpid atmospheres of his earlier imagery, while showing Eggleston as an artist who continues to expand his startling vision. Accompanying the exhibition will be a selection of album and compact disk covers featuring Eggleston’s imagery. These were created for various musicians—Alex Chilton, Spoon, Big Star, Chuck Prophet, Silver Jews, Primal Scream, Christopher Idylls, Joanna Newsom, and The Derek Trucks Band. 

William Eggleston: Anointing the Overlooked demonstrates that Eggleston, most celebrated for his photographs of the American South, is equally at ease across the country and around the world. Eggleston’s motivation for making color photography was simple and decidedly unpretentious. He wanted to see a lot of things in color because the world is in color. Unlike many photographers who take hundreds of photographs of a subject in order to achieve the “perfect” image, Eggleston is an artist with personal discipline who makes “one picture of one thing.” That picture may be a sign by the side of the road or just the side of the road. A person nicely dressed or just a dress. “Eggleston reminds us not to take anything for granted” Dr. Edwards concludes. “His photographs trigger connections, conjure memories and remind us always to check under the bed before going to sleep.”

William Eggleston: Anointing the Overlooked is organized by the Frist Center for the Visual Arts and was made possible by the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, which has lent generously from its permanent collection. The Frist Center for the Visual Arts also acknowledge the cooperation of the Eggleston Artistic Trust, Cheim and Read Gallery, New York, and the David Lusk Gallery, Memphis. The Frist Center for the Visual Arts is supported in part by the Metro Nashville Arts Commission and the Tennessee Arts Commission.

FRIST CENTER FOR THE VISUAL ARTS 

919 Broadway, Nashville, TN, 37203-3822

www.fristcenter.org