Eggleston’s Democratic Eye

“I had this notion of what I called a democratic way of looking around, that nothing was more or less important.” 
— William Eggleston

Quotidian. Democratic. Spontaneous. Mundane. Trenchant. Subdued. Poetic. Prosaic. Intimate. Vernacular. Gothic. Any Google search reveals an array of terms that apply with equal precision to the quality and content of photographer William Eggleston’s work, whose exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of art opens today. 
William Eggleston: Democratic Camera, Photographs and Video, 1961-2008 was curated by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, in association with Haus der Kunst, Munich, and it encompasses an array of 1960s black and white photos and video work, 1970s dye-transfer images and more recent ink-jet prints. 
His images have inspired both derision and praise. When his exhibition at New York's Museum of Modern Art in 1976 — the first one-man color photography show presented by the institution — the New York Times denounced it as “the most hated show of the year”.

Yet his work now invites comparisons to William Faulkner, and his sensibility is imprinted into films by Gus Van Sant, Dennis Hopper, David Byrne, David Lynch and Sophia Coppola. Consider The Virgin Suicides, Coppola’s 1999 film starring a splendor-in-the-grass Kirstin Dunst; compare it with Eggleston’s mid-1970s Memphis girl, a posy-print grass angel with a Brownie box camera held askew.

And if being photographed by Juergan Teller for a Marc Jacobs campaign is the equivalent of sealing one’s fate as an icon, Eggleston and his anthology of detritus and minutiae have transcended the cultural stratosphere. Look back to Jacob’s 2007 Spring-Summer campaign, which featured Eggleston, Charlotte Rampling, pinstripes, a rumpled bed, a seedy Paris hotel and a flat-light embrace of the domestic grotesque.

Visit the exhibition at LACMA: William Eggleston: Democratic Camera, Photographs and Video, 1961-2008, October 31, 2010 through January 16, 2011.

Get the book: William Eggleston: Democratic Camera, Photographs and Video, 1961-2008,  (Whitney Museum of American Art) by Ms. Elisabeth Sussman, Thomas. 
Watch: The Virgin Suicides.
Read: A Very Singular Vision, SF Said, telegraph.co.uk.

Untitled, Memphis, Tennessee, c. 1974-75.

Kirstin Dunst as Lux Lisbon in The Virgin Suicides, 1999.
William Eggleston and Charlotte Rampling, Juergan Teller for Marc Jacobs, 1997.