Tuesday, November 11, 2008

rampling the traditional association of art photography with black-and-white film.

this week Peter Schjeldahl covered William Eggleston's current show at the Whitney in a piece called "Local Color". Eggleston's show at the Whitney is called "William Eggleston: Democratic Camera, Photographs and Video, 1961-2008" and runs from november 7th to january 25th.

here are some of the highlights from peter's article:

"You can always tell a William Eggleston photograph. It’s the one in color that hits you in the face and leaves you confused and happy, and perhaps convinces you that you don’t understand photography nearly as well as you thought you did. To view [Eaggleston's at the Whitney] is to be pummelled by eccentric beauty, and to wonder about it. "

"His eye for epiphanies in the everyday raises suspicions that, without his aid, we miss more than we see of what falls within our gaze."

"He shoots like a shutterbug and executes like a painter. Synthetic gorgeousness iconizes pictures that flaunt the nonchalance of snapshots."

"Eggleston is a gregarious, much-travelled, hard-living dandy, proud never to have owned a pair of jeans."

"He’s an aesthete, not a propagandist. His great subject is the too-muchness of the real. He does regularly suppress one significant element of lived experience: time. His art re-proves Roland Barthes’s influential theory of the punctum—a Proustian quantum of lost time—as intrinsic to photography’s emotional power. The hour on Eggleston’s clock is always right now. Whatever is dated in his early subjects—car models, hairdos—barges into the present with a redolence of William Faulkner’s famous remark that the past isn’t only not dead, it isn’t even past."

"I think the emotional key to his genius is a stoical loathing, unblinking in the face of one scandalously uncongenial otherness after another. His subjects have no ascertainable dignity, except that of stubbornly existing. Nor does the hurting hipster behind the camera. All glory, such as it is, accrues to the art of photography, which doesn’t care what it beholds even as it burns it, through the eye, into the soul."


Read the full article here: Peter Schjeldahl "Local Color:

These photographs are part of a series of photos Eggleston took of Graceland in 1984

No comments:

Recent Posts