"I had this notion of what I called a democratic way of looking around, that nothing was more or less important."—William Eggleston
In 1976, John Szarkowski, the Director of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art, noted that “most color photography, in short, has been either formless or pretty. In the first case the meanings of color have been ignored; in the second they have been at the expense of allusive meanings.” It came as a surprise, therefore, that the same year the visionary Szarkowski chose William Eggleston, a Memphis-born photographer with a deep penchant for color, to become the first color photographer to receive a solo exhibition at MoMA. Expectedly, the exhibition sparked some controversy, with some critics decrying the all-too-familiar color images as banal snapshots of everyday life. Their concern was based on the lack of precedence for a color photography exhibition in a museum. Up until then photography exhibitions at MoMA had been of black and white photographs with strong social sensitivity such as the ones of works by Diane Arbus, Gary Winogrand and Lee Friendlander. By refuting tradition, therefore, Eggleston’s MoMA show became the art world’s cause célèbre, revered by some as an avant-garde, critiqued by others as trivializing fine art photography.
The controversy likely puzzled the young photographer, whose intention to use color derived from the simple fact that “I had wanted to see a lot of things in color because the world is in color.” Eggleston’s choice for the seemingly banal was likewise embedded in a humbling honesty: “Often, people ask me what I am photographing, which is a hard question to answer,” he once noted. “The best answer that I have come up with is: ‘Life, today.’” Indeed, Eggleston’s body of work is consistent in its celebration of the quotidian, elevating the formerly unseen to the very surface of social consciousness.
In Greenwood, Mississippi, 1973, the current lot, a seemingly unremarkable scene—an unadorned light bulb against a red ceiling—is presented from an unusual perspective, which likely necessitated Eggleston to stand on a platform and turn his lens up. “I am at war with the obvious,” Eggleston once stated, which propelled him at times to adopt angles that de-familiarized otherwise recognizable scenes. The sense of disorientation is compounded by the color red, which in essence covers every single surface in the room. To emphasize the strong impact of the color Eggleston chose to print the image as a dye transfer, which imbues the image with a rich and sumptuous saturation that is at once deeply seductive and curiously jarring. By doing so Eggleston presented an image that perfectly calibrates the aesthetic appeal with the compositional allure, satiating both of Szarkowski’s aforementioned criteria. In that regard, Greenwood, Mississippi is as much a study of color in synchrony with the mid-century American Color School Painting movement as it is a study of depth, lines and space. Moreover, the image is insistently banal in its subject matter, situating a light bulb—a mass-produced, cheap domestic appliance—at the center of an image that is seemingly closer to a snapshot than a studio shot in composition and style. Indeed, Untitled (Greenwood, Mississippi) is arguably perched at the pinnacle of Eggleston’s oeuvre, fully encompassing his photographic theses.
Likewise, in three other works: Sumner, Mississippi, circa 1970 (lot 134), Morton, Mississippi, 1969-70, (lot 142) and Near Jackson, Mississippi, circa 1970 (lot 138), Eggleston presents images that at first glance appear as approachable as photos in a family album, yet a closer look reveals otherwise. In all three photographs color assumes equal standing as the subject matter, presenting a cool, soothing green in Sumner, Mississippi that echoes the sense of privileged leisure that permeates the image; a subdued palette of earth tones in Morton, Mississippi that reflects the casual southern charm; and the striking red lining inside a child’s hooded coat in Near Jackson, Mississippi presents a jarring angle—both literally and metaphorically—of childhood. In all three works Eggleston ingeniously relied on color to add a rich narrative to his images, embodying another one of Szarkowski’s famed statements: “It isn’t what a picture is of, it is what it is about.” Indeed, Eggleston’s photographs brilliantly draw from the strength of color to heighten and reveal the understated magic and humility in everyday life, and set a new precedence for museum-caliber photography exhibitions.