The photographer William Eggleston first radicalized the art world 40 years ago with his colorful, dye-transfer prints; the same year he had undertaken a portfolio titled “Election Eve,” a road trip from his home in Memphis, Tennessee, to Jimmy Carter’s hometown of Plains, Georgia. He avoided, to paraphrase his famous quote, the obvious, and veered off the campaign trail, with its barber shops and town halls and babies to be kissed; instead he photographed emptied yards, sides of barns, churches with hand-painted names in crooked lettering, weeds poking through red Georgia clay, a Jimmy Carter for President sticker plastered to the bumper of a brown Chrysler in a rain-puddled parking lot. His pictures did not require human beings. I first saw some of the images that make up “Election Eve” around the time of Bush vs. Gore, and I have not trusted a poll since. The real signs, as they do with much of Eggleston’s work, lie in the landscape.
I went to meet him a week before the presidential election. In a room at the Bowery Hotel he sat in a loveseat and asked, in his low-register, if I would sit by him. His daughter, Andra, who designs textiles based on her father’s drawings, would soon join us. His Leica rested on a coffee table, next to a glass of water and an ashtray. CNN played on the television, but nobody in the room paid any attention to it, least of all Eggleston, who has steadfastly expressed disinterest in politics for as long as he has been giving interviews.
He wore a suit and an ascot tie, half undone, presumably for no particular reason other than the fact that he nearly always wears one. He claims to have never owned a pair of jeans. He was jacket-less, perfectly tailored, shoes shined. It was just the way he was dressed eight years ago in Memphis, when I first met him before his major retrospective at the Whitney Museum, and it was the way he had been dressed the previous evening at an Aperture Foundation gala, “Dear Bill,” at which he was the guest of honor. He had not, I had noticed, stuck around long enough to hear, “Nature Boy,” a song which was sung as a tribute to him. It was perfectly all right, we decided, that he had cut out a little early; after all, he had quite a lot going that week in New York, and for a good while to come. This was the eve, too, of Eggleston’s exhibition, “The Democratic Forest,” at the David Zwirner gallery, which began representing him late last year. The show featured a selection of new photographs from his epic series of some 1,500 photographs made between 1983 and 1986. In the ’80s, Eggleston described the project this way: “Friends would ask what I was doing and I would tell them that I was working on a project with several thousand prints. They would laugh but I would be dead serious. At least I had found a friend in that title, The Democratic Forest, that would look over me.”
Democratic, referring not to the Party, but to an equanimity of subject. If his 1976 Museum of Modern Art debut legitimized color photography as art (much to the initial scorn of the New York art world), the shelter of the title “Democratic Forest” gave him permission to go everywhere, beginning with the cotton fields of his native Mississippi and prowling the back lots and side roads and lost corners of the American South, Pittsburgh, Berlin, and elsewhere. In his hands, the camera becomes a palpable, itinerant presence; the scope feels restless, filmic. Nothing was off limits, and nothing mattered more than anything else. The image of a child’s face—even the face of his own child—carried no more photographic weight than a rusted car door. That car door could be freighted with just as much feeling as one of the luminous large-format portraits: artistically, Eggleston approached and treated them the same. His places and objects are attitudinally akin to a Cézanne still life, and frequently more autobiographically revelatory than his people. Place is central to Eggleston, and no junkyard, no field, no food stand, no porch, no laundry room can be viewed as insignificant.