Los Alamos

Los Alamos is a collection of images taken by William Eggleston between 1965 and 1974 as he traveled through Southern and Western America.  The book, first published in 2003 to accompany an exhibition at the Ludwig Museum in Germany, presents a selection of prints from a collection of some 2,200 negatives produced by Eggleston during this period.

Los Alamos provides us with further evidence of Eggleston innate attentiveness in capturing the life of the ordinary.  He photographed everyday life, objects and environments, recording them in their richness and unadorned states. 

These images of life never feel like they are studies but more like extended glances into the familiar.  The mundane and ordinary subject matter make the images accessible and understandable.  We’ve seen these things, these people before but maybe not like this. 

Untitled, 1965

This accessibility is further enhanced by the lack of depth and narrow perspective used by Eggleston.  He provides us with a human viewpoint. They are glimpses that we may have made ourselves but now we question whether we really ever saw what was there.  He reminds us that the ordinary is not so ordinary and that there is much vibrancy in the everyday.

Untitled, 1971 

It is this vibrancy and intensity that sets these images apart.  And it is Eggleston’s use of colour that achieves this.  Eggleston used colour at a time when it was only considered suitable for amateur photos or glossy commercial advertisements. It was at a time when "professional" photographers only took pictures in black-and-white. 

Black & White are the colours of photography – Robert Frank

Colour photography allowed Eggleston to use and control colour like a painter may.  Photography, for him, was always an extension of his love for the visual arts.  In 1973 Eggleston had discovered the now out-dated dye-transfer process.  It was a process predominantly used in the advertising industry during the 50s and 60s. The process resulted in giving specific colour’s enhanced saturation and increased intensity. With colour photography and his new found process Eggleston now had the tools to bring the ordinary and mundane to life. 

He shoots like a shutterbug and executes like a painter – Peter Schjeldahl

Eggleston draws us into his frames with his focused, targeted use of primary colour.  We are never left in doubt what or whom the subject of the photo is.  

 

Untitled [and] Untitled

The sky is used often like a curtain backdrop helping to contrast the show in front.  The intensity of the blue providing us with a frame for his subject matter.

Untitled, 1971

The intensity of Eggleton’s colours are rarely matched by the intensity of life underneath.  There are always signs of deterioration of wear and tear, whether it is a car, a sign, a face.  We are reminded of the fragility of ordinary life.  There are always cracks on the surface but maybe we sometime don’t notice them.  Eggleston ensures that we never bore of the mundane and the ordinary and reminds us that is such vibrancy and intensity to what we see everyday.

Untitled, 1965-1968

American Prospects

In 1978, on the back of a Guggenheim fellowship, Joel Sternfeld set out to explore America and its ever changing landscape.  The final work was initially exhibited in 1984 at the Museum of Modern Art under the title “Three Americas”, comprising images from his initial year on the road as well as two subsequent years.  The work was published in 1987 as “American Prospects” and presents another landmark visual account of America in a similar tradition to that carried out by Walker Evans (American Photographs) and Robert Frank (The Americans).

The images from American Prospects demonstrate Sternfeld’s move from the spontaneity of the snapshot to the more composed image; a conscious result of his transition from using a 35mm Leica hand held to a large format camera (8x10).  This new format, with its slower picture taking process, forced deliberation and allowed him to stand back and assemble his shots. In some ways Sternfeld was moving from the sketchbook to the blank canvas where composition became more prepared and to some extent staged. 

In addition to, or resulting from Sternfeld’s increasingly directorial role, he moves his point of view higher and back from his subjects.  This “celestial perspective” allows him to join the foreground and background on to one continuous plain.  Increasingly influenced by compositional and colour painting conventions, he begins to assemble and capture scenes as a painter may. He brings a map like quality to the image; flattening out his points of focus and points of narrative into one large depiction providing the viewer a birds eye view of the scene below.  This new compositional style and his use of people in a photo was inspired by similar approaches taken by traditional painters such as Pieter Bruegel the Elder and Jacob van Ruisdael.  Sternfeld’s frames had now become landscapes within "landscapes". 

From left:  The Fight between Carnival and Lent (Peter Bruegel the Elder, 1559), Wet n' Wild Aquatic Theme Park, Orlando (Sternfeld 1980)

This new elevated position provides a less voyeuristic and more observational perspective for the viewer.   The images unfold upon inspection, bringing the viewer into multiple areas of the frame, sometimes the edges providing the most interest.

The collection of images showcases the cultural and social humanity of America juxtaposed in its natural surroundings.  They provide a perspective of an America ever changing and beautiful but one at odds with its “utopian dreams” and the natural landscape it inhabits.  While always aesthetically pleasing, the images are tainted by a gentle skepticism.  He mixes magic with sadness, hope with uncertainty and prospect with danger.  

Lake Oswega, Oregon (1979)

Sternfeld evidently questions America’s "prospects" but does so in an objective manner.  We sense his own uncertainty about the future based on his observation of the present and the past.  Never cynical but always dubious, you can’t help feel that Sternfeld is painting a picture of reserved hope. It is an America that strives for constant progress but at times succumbs to the pitfalls this ambition brings. Any sense of progress is typically tempered by a reminder of the abandonment of the past.  A prevailing gloominess penetrates the beauty of what America has become or is becoming.

After a Flash Flood, Rancho Mirage, California (1979)