Darkness is falling outside the window of William Eggleston’s fifth-floor apartment in midtown Memphis, and the silences that punctuate his conversation have grown even longer. After several hours in his company, I am preparing to take to take my leave, when suddenly he decides he is going to play the piano for me. I help him to his feet and he makes his way unsteadily to the magnificent Bösendorfer grand in the corner of his living room. Once seated, he stares for a few long moments at the keyboard, as if lost in thought.
“I play the piano maybe two or three times a day,” he told me earlier, “but only if she wants to be played. I speak to her and she talks back. Mostly, just to say: ‘What’s in there?’ She is almost always responsive.”
This evening, the piano wants to be played. The 78-year-old photographer, who has imbibed several glasses of bourbon-on-ice in the past hour or so, calls up a snatch of a Beethoven piano sonata from memory. It is the starting point for a long extemporisation that unfolds slowly and tentatively at first, becoming more complex and compelling as his concentration becomes total. Time seems to slow down in the room as the reflection of his wristwatch dances on the wall behind him and the light fades on the treetops beyond the window. The mystery that is William Eggleston deepens.
In his eighth decade, the man whom many consider the world’s greatest living photographer has surprised the art world by releasing his debut album on the indie rock label Secretly Canadian. Entitled Musik, it comprises 13 often dramatic improvisations on compositions by Bach (his hero) and Handel as well as his singular takes on a Gilbert and Sullivan tune and the jazz standard On the Street Where You Live. Even more surprising, to those of us who have witnessed his serene piano playing on several occasions over the years, the works are played entirely on a Korg synthesiser (bought in the 1980s and now broken beyond repair), and assume the character of experimental electronic soundscapes.
The original recordings survive on 49 floppy discs that amount to around 60 hours of improvisation. Producer Tom Lunt, a friend of his son, Winston, undertook the mammoth task of editing and remastering the tapes. Eggleston professes to have had “nothing whatsoever” to do with the selection of tracks or the release of the album. The results are by turns challenging and mesmerising. “There’s the same sense of freedom you find in his photography,” Lunt said recently of the album, while Eggleston’s close friend the film director David Lynch has described it as “music of wild joy with freedom and bright, vivid colours”. The great washes of synthetic sound, sometimes seductively symphonic, sometimes ominous, certainly add a new resonance to the photographer’s most famous quotation about being “at war with the obvious”.
Last year I interviewed Eggleston on stage at the National Portrait Gallery in London; he was in a wheelchair following a bad fall. Today, he moves through the apartment with the aid of a silver-topped cane, which accentuates his aristocratic demeanour. He is as stylish as ever in a white dress shirt with a red, paisley-patterned Ascot, untied, falling from the collar, pressed formal trousers and shiny Oxford brogues. For years, he had his suits made to order on Savile Row, but now, he tells me, they are provided by Stella McCartney, whom he refers to, with a twinkle in his eye, as his current favourite “girlfriend”. Another of his “girlfriends”, Alex, an artist who hails from Hot Springs, Arkansas, and whose work is pinned to the wall behind him, arrives towards the end of our meeting to keep him company. “There are quite a few of them out there,” he says, smiling mischievously.
Following the death of his wife, Rosa, in 2015, Eggleston reluctantly vacated the family home for this large apartment in a well-heeled residential “retirement community”. Alongside the piano stands a state-of-the-art hi-fi system and some huge speakers. “One of the advantages of being here is that all the neighbours are deaf. I can play the piano loudly all night if I want to. I often do.”
He remains defiantly intemperate, getting through a pack of Natural American Spirit cigarettes during our conversation and visibly livening up as his “cocktail hour” arrives. It begins at 5pm and ends around 8pm, unless he has polished off his daily alcohol allowance (half a bottle of Jack Daniel’s Black Label) before then, which is often the case. Things can get quite surreal by the second glass. The next day, he will tell me that he has more than half a million negatives, which seems a lot. When I mention it to his son, Winston, he informs me that there are in fact around 55,000.
Given that Eggleston began playing the piano, he says, aged four, I ask him if he regrets not becoming a concert pianist (as his parents briefly hoped he might). “I can say no because I don’t have much of a desire to perform in public,” he responds. “When I play, I’m really playing for myself. If friends are around when that happens, they often say: ‘Oh, Bill, it’s so beautiful. I’d love to hear that again.’ And I say: ‘Well, I didn’t write it down.’ It’s here and it’s gone – like a dream.”