Light Fantastic

Thirty-two years ago, the photographer William Eggleston leaped from obscurity to notoriety with an art-world debut that the New York Times called “the most hated show of the year.” It was a fancy dive from the most visible platform there could be, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. “William Eggleston’s Guide,” it was called, as though he were taking you on a tour, but one prone to dwell on the sketchiest roadside attractions. In a photo by Eggleston there might be a sunbeam that sweetly anoints a full dish rack on a white sink. There might also be a dismal suburban tract house or a bunch of plastic bottles scattered across a dirt road. It was a make-of-it-what-you-will exhibition, and a lot of critics didn’t know what to make of it. The Times critic called it “perfectly boring.”

What made it all the more challenging was that Eggleston worked in color. In 1976 serious photographers were expected to work in black and white, and most museums assumed that camera art could be made only within the palette you might find in a cinder block. And then there were Eggleston’s pictures of places where no one had ever bothered to point a camera before, like the green tiled interior of an empty shower stall or the strangely mesmerizing blackness of an open kitchen oven. In 1961 photographer Robert Frank said, “You can photograph anything now.” But it took Eggleston to prove it.

“When I was taking that oven picture,” Eggleston says today, “I thought the results would be unlike any other picture I had seen. You just don’t encounter too many pictures of open ovens.” All these years later, you still don’t, but his work is no longer so puzzling. What it is instead is famous, influential and even venerated, the kind of work that gets you a big retrospective like the one opening on Nov. 7 at the Whitney Museum of American Art in Manhattan and traveling to Munich and Washington. With about 150 photos and two videos, including a rather loopy one from the early 1970s, “William Eggleston: Democratic Camera” will be the largest American museum show ever devoted to his work. And this time, no one will be bored.

Eggleston is what you might call a bohemian of independent means, a descendant of the Mississippi Delta planter aristocracy who was also for a time the lover of Viva, the Andy Warhol superstar. Since the mid-1960s, he has lived, comfortably and at full throttle, in Memphis, Tenn.

When he comes to the door, he’s in his customary Wasp regalia, a button- down cotton shirt and white suede shoes. Quantities of nicotine and bourbon have produced his voice, a liquid Southern baritone that reminds you of his friend Shelby Foote. It’s a voice he dispenses in small doses. What that means is that he can stretch a sentence into next week while he deliberates on his next syllable or two.

He has lived an interesting life. At 69, Eggleston has been married to his wife Rosa for 44 years and raised three children. But his definition of wedlock has been elastic enough to permit numerous girlfriends and affairs. He has been known to shoot indoors–guns, not just pictures. There have been various run-ins with the law. And over the years, he’s been the best of friends with Jim Beam and Jack Daniel’s. He’s also been one of the most original artists of your lifetime.

Eggleston’s maternal grandfather, a judge in Sumner, Miss., owned a sizable cotton plantation. After Eggleston’s father shipped off to the Pacific in World War II, the boy and his mother shuttled for years between Florida and his grandparents’ places in Mississippi. Eggleston preferred their house in town to the plantation. “Life in the country was sort of remote,” he says. “It was lonely. There was nothing in every direction but cotton fields.”

Because he suffered from asthma as a boy, Eggleston was mostly an indoor child, absorbed by the piano, cameras and sound equipment. Later he attended a few colleges, including Vanderbilt and the University of Mississippi, without managing to graduate from any. But at Ole Miss, where he studied painting, he started to wonder seriously about photography. And by the early ’70s, he had come upon dye-transfer printing, a method that produces deeply saturated color. This is why, when he makes a picture of a rooftop sign that reads PEACHES!, the orange letters just about sear your retina.

Though he’s widely traveled and keeps an apartment in Paris, Eggleston has worked mostly in the South. All the same, it makes him squirm to hear people describe him as a regional artist–Faulkner with a Leica. “I have never considered myself making what one would call Southern art,” he says. “There is such a thing, but I don’t do it.” He insists he’s not interested in local color, though there’s no denying that it finds its way into a lot of his images. “The pictures look Southern because that’s where they were taken,” he says with a shrug. “I don’t know how to make them look any other way, unless I go changing the landscape around here with chainsaws.”

Eggleston also doesn’t like the term snapshot aesthetic, but from early on, just like Garry Winogrand and Lee Friedlander, he’s been making pictures that are brilliantly open to the flotsam of the visible world, the little accidents of vision and oddball details that snapshots automatically gather up. He is fascinated by American junk-space, the banal stretches of tract housing and strip malls. But there’s nothing camp or ironic about Eggleston’s work. The power of his pictures rests on their casual but absolute sincerity, their conviction that small is beautiful. There’s something very American about this, a valorization of the commonplace, carried to a level of intensity that can curl your toes. Looking at his picture of a soda bottle simply perched on the hood of a car, you can’t help thinking of what Henry James once wrote about Nathaniel Hawthorne: “The minuteness of the things that attract his attention, and that he deems worthy of being commemorated, is frequently extreme.”

Eggleston has said he doesn’t make a distinction between one image and another. So how does he choose which ones to publish or exhibit? “I don’t,” he says. And he means it. His working method is to take hundreds, even thousands of pictures–though rarely more than one shot of any particular scene–and let his curator or editors sort it out. For “William Eggleston’s Guide,” John Szarkowski, the legendary MOMA photo curator, effectively served a role like the one that editor Maxwell Perkins played for novelist Thomas Wolfe, drawing a meaningful work out of a superabundant output.

Eggleston isn’t a religious man. “Oh, no, just the opposite,” he says. “The idea of a soul to me is ridiculous.” But there’s a kind of spirituality in his pictures, an assent to things as they are and a conviction that the whole of creation is worth your careful attention. Look at his picture of a grocery boy pushing a rack of carts, or a hand stirring a drink on a flight, and you can’t help realizing that, even in its most incidental corners, it’s a bright, beckoning world out there. And that there’s nothing boring about it.

Steady Art Beat Richard Lacayo blogs daily about art and architecture at time.com/lookingaround