The exhibition covers various periods of the artist's production. It presents a selection of works from his main projects/exhibitions/books, including early black and white works and video.
Overall, the exhibition constitutes an interesting retrospective of Eggleston work which consist mainly of color photography.
Eggleston and his contemporaries from the 70', such as Stephen Shore and Joel Meyerowitz, contributed to make color photography recognized as a legitimate artistic medium. Still the pictures are not examples of experimentation into the use of color. Probably the photographers of the period were saved by fellows artists who used color to explore abstraction.
Instead, color is used to portray aspects of reality as the photography of that period dwelved quasi obsessively into the dire realism of scenes such parking lots and gas stations, motel rooms, broken toys, etc.
Color became a medium of choice also probably due to its convenience and ability to capture immediacy. For instance, the exhibition include some vintage drug store prints, which are great. Most of the show prints are dye transfer, which like Cibachrome prints, deliver images of popping color and are resistant to fade. The best are the vintage prints included in the "14 pictures" serie which open the show. Modern prints while interesting are less striking. Also very nice are the occasional exhibition prints as well as some inkjet prints, notably from the "5x7" series of portraits.
The exhibition most of all shows Eggleston ease and sophisticated composition skills.
The texts is well written, factual and informative. The relationship between the author and the American south and Memphis in particular is explained in great length.
The early B/W pix and the videos are skipable. In general I would advise against including videos altogether at shows as I find these exhibits noisy and distracting.
Among the series on show
Graceland: Illustrates Elvis kitsch. WE commercial work. Text states WE didn't care much about Elvis.
Election eve: WE to cover Carters election campaign, instead portrays aspects of decaying south, such as old barns. From show/catalogue text
Just before the election of 1976, Eggleston received a commission from Rolling Stone magazine to photograph presidential candidate Jimmy Carter, his family, and their hometown of Plains, Georgia. Carter was away campaigning while Eggleston was there photographing, however, so none of the images show the politician. Although the magazine never printed the photographs, the following year Election Eve was published in two volumes containing one hundred chromogenic prints, taken in Plains and the surrounding area.
The publication’s format was based on Alexander Gardner’s 1865 two-volume Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book of the Civil War, which contained original albumen prints of sites, scenes, and people associated with the Civil War. More than a century later, Eggleston’s Election Eve presents the South as a place of flat fields, grand old trees, and dilapidated wooden structures interspersed with some signs of modernity, like oil tanks, or plastic flags blowing in the wind. Bypassing any overt references either to the violent war that divided the country or to the important southern Democrat, Eggleston’s images of the land tell their own story of past and present.
Los Alamos: result of several trips WE took in the late 60' and early 70', most spontaneous work, predates "Guide", never published, great example of travel photography.
WE Guide/MoMA 1976: classic stuff
