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3/5/2007

William Eggleston

Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich

Portfolios

curated by Inka Graeve Ingelmann

William Eggleston is considered one of the great legends of photography. For over 30 years now the work of the nestor of artistic colour photography has exercised a strong influence over contemporary photographic art. His portfolio "Southern Suite", which was recently acquired with the aid of PIN, provides an opportunity to present four of the artist's most important early portfolios for the first time.

William Eggleston (*1939 Memphis, Tennessee) grew up on his parents' cotton plantation and started taking photographs as a teenager. During his studies at Vanderbilt University he took an intensive interest in photography and was inspired by the work of Walker Evans und Henri Cartier-Bresson in particular. After initial experimentation with black and white photography he decided to concentrate on working solely in colour from 1965 onwards. During a trip to New York Eggleston made the acquaintance not only of such leading contemporary photographers as Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander and Gary Winogrand but also of the influential photography curator John Szarkowski. Nine years later, Szarkowski organised a solo exhibition for him at New York's Museum of Modern Art, a show that was to lay the foundations for Eggleston's fame. To this day it is regarded as a milestone in photography - as is his 'William Eggleston's Guide' which appeared at the same time and is now available as a reprint. In the course of his career as a photographer Eggleston has published more than twenty portfolios and art books and his works have gone on display in numerous exhibitions. He still undertakes journeys around the globe, documenting his impressions in comprehensive photo projects. In addition to the many prizes he has received, he was granted the Hasselblad Award for his life's work and also the Getty Images Lifetime Achievement Award (2004).

Eggleston's oeuvre comprises some ten thousand photographs, of which only very few have been enlarged, exhibited and published to this day. His photographs are characterised by a masterly interpretation of colour. He sees in colour and translates it into virtuoso, pictorial compositions that are intensified through the elaborate technique of dye transfer. Eggleston's photographic style is borrowed from the aesthetics of the snapshot. He photographs a particular moment in time, capturing whatever happens to seize his attention: trivial, casually charming things or places that he charges atmospherically and intensifies into an ongoing visual novel of the American South. However, his photographs are never documents; but rather autonomous pictures that seek more than anything to satisfy themselves. Laconically, wittily, sometimes melancholically, at other times full of bitter irony, they recount the ugliness and beauty of the world around us, the surface of images and their hidden mysteries. In doing so, each photograph becomes part of an ever-growing, complex cosmos of pictures in which all the subjects are of equal value. "Democratic" is how Eggleston defines this view of the world.

In 1974, even before his trailblazing and controversially debated exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, Eggleston published his first portfolio >14 Pictures<, in retrospect a prelude to 'William Eggleston's Guide' that was to appear two years later. In loose succession the pictures assembled here manifest Eggleston's specific view of the world, his own particular approach to photographic art that defies conventional standards. It is one he continues in his portfolios "Troubled Waters" (1980) and "Southern Suite" (1981). In 1983 Eggleston was commissioned to photographs of "Graceland", the last refuge of Elvis Presley, for a tourist guidebook. Against normal practice he was forced to work under cramped conditions at night using artificial light. The sale of the album with his pictures in it turned out to be short-lived. In 1984 Eggleston published his own selection of eleven photographs. They present an insightful psycho-gram of Presley and his posthumous glorification.

Opening may 4, 2007

Pinakothek der Moderne
Kunstareal | Barer Str. 29 - Munich

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