Showing posts with label william eggleston. Show all posts
Showing posts with label william eggleston. Show all posts

Thursday, May 9, 2013

The Colourful World of William Eggleston



Art is man's constant effort to create for himself a different order of reality from that which is given to him
CHINUA ACHEBE

William Eggleston's exhibition at MOMA in 1976 is widely considered to be the tipping point in the eventual acceptance of colour photography as a legitimate artistic medium.

Inspired by the visual arts, he has since gone on to inspire a generation of artists with his colourful vivid and sometime uneasy depictions of the everyday.

Green Dress, 1970

His subject matter is familiar to us. We relate to the images but are unsettled as, through his camera, we now see the familiar through a new light, a new angle and in a new intensity of colour.

There exists a heightened sense of reality. The everyday qualities of the objects, people or landscapes are replaced with an unexpected and unsettling aura through unusual but balanced compositions and real but unnaturally saturated colours.

Eggleston’s photographs look like they were taken by a Martian who lost the ticket for his flight home and ended up working at a gun shop in a small town near Memphis
GEOFF DYER


William Eggleston, from William Eggleston in the Real World

The 2005 documentary William Eggleston in the Real World shows us first hand how the artist probes and searches out his subjects; peering into shop windows, front gardens, roaming the streets and buildings as if he had lost something precious.  When found, the subject is photographed, once, and the haphazard but exhaustive search continues again.

I believe in taking one picture of one picture
WILLI AM EGGLESTON

Green Car, 1965

Colour is the defining characteristic of his work.  Through colour, the ‘pictures’ relate on a sensory and emotional level providing the transformative power to turn the banal and common into the surreal.  Without colour the unusual would revert to its common state.  If reproduced in back & white Eggleston believes that his images, except for purposes of identification, “might as well not be reproduced” at all.

The following is an exploration into the role colour plays in transforming the world we know in into this world that we thought we knew.  It is a journey, under a number of themed headings, through the colourful world of William Eggleston examining his relationship with colour, his influences and his own influence on contemporary visual arts.

To take a photograph is to align the head, the eye and the heart. It's a way of life
HENRI-CARTIER BRESSON


1. THE PROCESS

Any discussion relating to Eggleston and his use of colour has to include, or even start with, his discovery of the dye transfer process in 1972, a process exclusively used at that time for the commercial printing of magazines and advertisements.

That is what got me interested. I would look at these advertisements say in Vogue…and I kept thinking, 'I wonder what Eggleston would look like in this process?
WILLI AM EGGLESTON

Cigarette Advertisement, 1970s

It was a complex, expensive and time-consuming process that basically involved the separation of three color negatives, made by photographing the original negative with black & white film through three filters (red, green and blue). The separations (matrices) were in turn soaked in organic dyes of yellow, magenta and cyan and then meticulously aligned and rolled over specialist paper, transferring the dye to paper.


Two girls on couch, 1976 (separations)

Photographic colour prints were predominately produced at that time as a C-Print (chromogenic coupler print) producing more “faithful” and less dramatic results than that of the dye process. The dye process exaggerated the colour values of an image allowing a photographer to obtain higher saturation in nominated colour fields (e.g. red) without affecting the rest of the colours in the image.  It gave a new level of control only provided in recent times by the emergence of digital photography.

Eggleston now had a new lush set of paints allowing an unprecedented influence and control over his pictures.  He now had a medium capable of depicting the world he was seeing.


Green Window, 1993

The dye transfer process helped Eggleston inject the ordinary with a heightened level of colour, intensifying the atmosphere and tension in in the frame and dislocating the viewer form the real world being presented. 


Hot Sauce, 1980
Eggleston's work and career was now transformed.  Colour was now not just part of the picture but it was the picture.  A process that was  being utilised to best show off products for sale was now being used to to show vivid and visceral depictions of common everyday objects, landscapes and people.  


Peaches, 1973

As advertisements were presenting abstracted realities to its audiences so to was Eggleston and both used the dye transfer process to help achieve this abstraction.  A process used to seduce, entice and persuade was now being applied to the bland of the everyday.  It was this juxtaposition that in some way unsettled the viewer.  Eggleston used the seductive, enticing and persuasive colour dye process and applied it to common objects and in doing so made us think about the very nature of his subject matter.

Dolls

It was also this abstraction of colour that turned what could be deemed photography into art. We were no longer seeing the world through the eyes of a photographer but through that of an artist with a new found medium.

I don’t think anything has the seductivity of the dyes…by the time you get into those dyes it doesn’t look at all like the scene, which in some cases is what you want
WILLIAM EGGLESTON

The vivid dyes defamiliarise the objects presented. We are provided a new intensifying filter of Eggleston to see the world through, rendering the ordinary strange.

You’re stepping into some kind of jagged world that seems like Eggleston’s World
ED RUSCHA


Shoes under a bed, c. 1973

Monday, April 8, 2013

The car window as a frame of the american society

(spell checking in progress)



Recent history of the united states is intimately linked to the history of the automobile and the effects it has had on lifestyles. It is the symbol of freedom that has characterized the American society. More than a simple object of consumption, cars have been elevated as a modern way of living. They shaped lifestyles but also landcapes, wich were made around them. Cities such as Detroit or Atlanta are the concrete symbolization of that societal phenomenon, they are made by cars and for cars. As a central issue of american society, automotive and their resuting lanscapes constitue a recurring theme for photograph from 50’s to now. 


Detroit satellite views - Google Maps


From the outside


The importance of the automobile in society is particulary recurrent among the phtographers wich use Evan’s «Documentary style». The photographic exhibition New Topographics can be seen as a starting point of the car society as a central subject. Sore’s or Baltz’s pictures of suburbian areas with their empty and anonymous huge streets, parking lots and warehouses are a portrait of that part of the USA in wich man made landscapes seems to be not made for humans. 

That paradoxical face of the american society, unsightly and bearer of a myth at the same time is also shown in William Egglestone work. Dramatic urban lanscapes are here sublimated by a intensification of colors, giving theme an cinematographic aspect. As hilm Maker Michael Almereyda said on Eggleston’s work : «the commonplace becomes resplendent»




William Egglestone


From the inside


In most recent Lee Friedlander work, the automobile is not only the subject for the photographer but tends to be his own frame. As the serie title America By Car  suggests, cars are no longer just a founding element of the society but also a way to see it. Most of that pictures are taken through the windscreen, givin again a cinematographic vision of urban landscapes.. 

A New American Picture by Doug Rickard can be seen as a futuristic version of that work. Pictures are here selected from Google street view system. The point of view is quite different then, above eye level on the roof of the car. The process is automated with a wide angle camera taking everything which can be seen from the street. Cars seem here to take supremacy on human eye, giving theme a social documentary apect.



Doug Rickard

Lee Friedlander

The symbol of automobile and his role in the american post war society is a major subject for phtographers. It reveals a main face of USA, mixing common places and symbol of supremacy. It also reveals some backhand of that society, such as social exclusion. From that point, those pictures can be seen as well as a political critique of urban development, turning cars into a mode of expression more than a simple photographic subject.




Monday, March 25, 2013

Common Colour


I propose to investigate the role of colour in showing the vitality in the banality of everyday life in America with particular focus on the work of the “new colour” photographers of the 1970s. 


Hot Sauce, William Eggleston

In an effort to explore the above, I have identified the themes below as potential areas of interest to explore further.  These themes could then be further supported and augmented by primary research in the form of a series of photographic projects investigating the applications of colour on everyday subject matter.

Acceptance. Investigate the change of attitude towards the use of colour in photography in the 1970s. Although invented in 1907, it took until the 1970s for colour photography to be accepted seriously into the photographic world. 

Black & White are the colours of photography – Robert Frank



Once upon a time there were jobs, Robert Frank, 1955

What were the underlying barriers to its acceptance? What was the tipping point (or points) that leads to its acceptance? What was the role of art movements such as abstract expressionism and pop-art, in its renaissance?

Advocates. William Eggleston was the first proponent of colour photography to be truly accepted by the art world when John Szarkowski showed his work at MOMA in 1976. The publication, William Eggleston's Guide, in which Szarkowski called Eggleston's photographs "perfect," focus on everyday, umdane and trivial subjects.



William Eggleston's Guide, 1976


Perfect? Perfectly banal, maybe…perfectly boring, certainly  Hilton Kramer, New York art critic 

The research aims to focus on Eggleston’s work as well as the other  “new color” photographers of the 70s and 80s such as Stephen Shore and Joel Sternfeld.

Ginger Shore, Stephen Shore, 1977



Uncommon Places, Stephen Shore, 1982


Uncommon Places, Stephen Shore, 1982



Joel Sternfeld

Application. What tangible attributes does colour bring to a photo (life, focus, emphasis, energy etc.)? What were the various processes used and why? (e.g. Eggleston’s discovery of the dye-transfer process in 1973) What meaning (psychological) can be attributed to the use of colour in photography?





Subject. What effect did the application of colour have on the representation of daily life in America?  How did it change the perception of everyday life in America? 


William Eggleston



Sunday, March 24, 2013

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