“ I had this notion … of what I called a democratic way of looking around:
that nothing was more important or less important. “_ William Eggleston

After exploring his work I found William Eggleston really fascinating perhaps not because of his political views or controversies as other photographers and peers of his but because of his ability to invite us to take a careful investigation of how we look at the world. His work spawns form the banal and the daily life and how he iconize these situations and objects with the use of photo techniques that although may seem random; intrinsically we find order simplicity and democracy behind the lens.

Eggleston was born in July 27, 1939 in Memphis, Tennessee but grew up in the small Mississippi town of Sumner. At an early age he demonstrated an inclination to visual media, collecting postcards and cutting out pictures from magazines but during his college years he developed his interest in photography. His fascination with the medium took root when he saw Henri Cartier-Bresson’s “The Decisive Moment” and Walker Evans’ “American Photographs”. He personally list them as his influences. We can see in Eggleston a lot of these two photographers specially a lot Cartier-Bresson’s unique ability to capture a moment, to freeze action and capture feeling in a still. This is the groundwork of one of Eggleston’s most acclaimed collections the Los Alamos Project a collection of eighty-eight dye-transfer prints of his photographs made between 1965 and 1974 in Eggleston’s native Memphis, Tennessee and during numerous cross-country road trips through the southern United States. Eggleston interaction and approach to the subjects were remarkable and his work is a time stamp of America that resonate even today.

Moreover, I believe Eggleston is a careful observer he photograph what gets his attention without bias towards the subject. The observational quality of his work is intense but at the same time playful it seems like a wandering eye hovering around a playground. Most of his photographs function as a chronicle of the changes in the South, the industrialization, the passing of time, the invasion of fast food joints, the departure of the old ways to fade into the new horizons of change. North blends with South and black and white make way to color. I believe that the characteristics represented by Eggleston’s persona are fundamental to any aspiring photographer in order to create democracy in the camera’s viewfinder. Think about it this way “all subjects are important, yet none is”. In Eggleston eyes “a photograph is what it is” (Eggleston) just a representation of time untitled and un-captioned. A portal into a time that could be anytime or any place. The photographer makes the image the viewer writes the story within the frame of the composition.

Critics may argue that the greatest thing about Eggleston was not that he popularized color, because in the end one way or the other color photography would have found it’s way into the museum walls. It is the strength of his compositions, that serve as his forte and main asset even in his black and white work his compositional sense remain strong. His looking for symmetry while shooting random style one click at a time and abruptly changing subject as we see him do in the film documentary by Reiner Holzemer’s William Eggleston: Photographer. Digital photographers today may think that Eggleston’s jumping from subject to subject may be due to the downside and limitations of shooting on film regarding quantity and the need to make every shot count and try to cover as much ground as possible but it really seems that perhaps is just his inspiration workflow. On an interview he one told that he shoots everything once and that if he could not get the shot then he couldn’t, simply as that, no regrets for lost frames. Just moving forward and carrying on. In the end his composition regimes take him even to intentionally crop subjects to suit his composition standards and metric within his work a characteristic greatly criticized by the purists of the medium but very characteristic in his personal work photographing “the ugly stuff” as a personal friend of his once called.

One of Eggleston’s Los Alamos photographs that caught my eye was the one with the young man pushing the shopping carts into the supermarket. What would be a normal photo turned into an amazing and beautiful portrait because of how the lightning showered on the subject. It literally lifted him from the banality and the ordinary quality of
his job to an icon of the working force sort of speak. That is a decisive moment right there on it’s own, everything makes sense in your eyes and in the camera eye. Light is good and you have the desired focus. One detail that may seem to scape our gaze is that the subject is partially cropped but his action remains and as a viewer you can understand plainly what he is doing because Eggleston images give you enough content to make closures on your own. In his photo portfolio you can see the difference between a tourist and a local. He has played both sides of the coin but his southern roots in the end always show because of the proximity he has towards the subject. He has truly democratized the medium shining light and blurring the relationships between figure and ground one subject at a time.

In my experience as an aspiring photographer I look up to Eggleston color processing inside his works, is a quality very difficult to dodge at first sight. It is in fact real solid work and it is obvious because the first thing that the eye register is color. I personally feel that it has paved the ground for color manipulation and image grading in these digital days. However the true quality and take away from the photos is the constant experimentation within the medium and the subjects portrayed. How just a little lightning will do the trick and make an image perfect or how just a simple tilt of the camera could reveal a new horizon.