Democracy Before The Digital Age: The Legacy of William Eggleston

If one weren’t conversant with the trajectory of contemporary fine art photography, then stepping into David Zwirner’s Hong Kong gallery might not be a particularly emotional experience. The William Eggleston photos that hang on the walls, which were shot on film in the 1970s, look not too much different from pictures that we see nowadays—in art galleries but also, say, on Instagram: candid shots of the mundane, or simple portraits of folks interrupted from their everyday routines.

Of course, anyone with even a passing interest in recent art history or who has thrown a hat in the photography game should know the given name of the man they call the Father of Colour Photography. What seems ordinary today was not, back then, and Eggleston has given modern photography more than just colour, but an entire ethos and approach that is at once both singular and groundbreaking.

The gallery has a collection of iconic photographers on its roster, and since its opening exhibition with Wolfgang Tillmans two years ago, has shown at least one great name annually, following up Tillmans with Thomas Ruff and then Philip-Lorca diCorcia. But while each of the three have had mini-survey shows at Zwirner, Eggleston’s focuses squarely on the five-year period surrounding his groundbreaking show in 1976 at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the first-ever colour photography exhibition in the museum’s history, which garnered intensely negative reactions and reviews—but set the stage for the future of art photography beyond the confines of black and white.

Those reviews are now just a blip in the past. Leo Xu, Senior Director, David Zwirner Hong Kong, sees the exhibition curation as showcasing a slice of history. “The works in this show were shot between 1973 to 1978, when Eggleston first entered the art history canon. What was his style at that time? How did he imagine the language and media of colour? The Hong Kong exhibition can provide some insights into these questions.”

Critics at the time didn’t just take offense with his use of colour, although that was then a format reserved only for advertising and commercial photography. They hated his fascination with the ordinary, and his rendering of the everyday in such an undramatic manner. “Dismal figures inhabiting a commonplace world of little visual interest,” denounced The New York Times critic Hilton Kramer.

These, ironically, are exactly what make us love Eggleston today: the specific tone of sunlight that is signature to the American South; the lurid tackiness of a gigantic wall-mounted swordfish in a drab little diner; the visible edge of an open car door adjacent to a standing woman, that could so easily have been closed or cropped out. The ordinary—made extraordinary.

“They were more than just coloured black-and-white photos,” reminds Xu. “Eggleston’s early works focused on American subjects from the 1970s, such as automobiles, road trips and gas stations. Compared with his deeper observation on the socio-cultural and geographic subjects in the later works, his early works demonstrate bolder exploration in the expression of colours.”

Read more