PHOTO:William Eggleston-2¼
Born in Memphis in 1939, William Eggleston is regarded as one of the greatest photographers of his generation and a major American artist who has fundamentally changed how the urban landscape is viewed. He obtained his first camera in 1957 and was later profoundly influenced by Henri Cartier-Bresson’s “The Decisive Moment”. Eggleston introduced dye-transfer printing, a previously commercial photographic process, into the making of artists’ prints. His exhibition “Photographs by William Eggleston” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1976 was a milestone. He was also involved in the development of video technology in the seventies.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: David Zwirner Gallery Archive
William Eggleston’σ radical departure from conventional composition combined with the pioneering use of the dye transfer print process became the hallmark of Eggleston’s career. His reliance on dyes as a primary medium was an unprecedented aesthetic and conceptual choice that made a deep impact in the world of photograph. Originally developed for advertising, and advertising copy, the dye transfer printing method carried commercial and consumer connotations and had never before been used by an artist. By exaggerating particular hues and making use of the broadest color and tonal ranges, Eggleston added a psychological component, even an hallucinatory atmosphere to his pictures of the everyday. The arresting saturated palette, richness and unmatched depth of Eggleston’s prints are paralleled with a subtle emotional effect. A series of William Eggleston’s square-format colou photographs from the 1970s are on presentation in the exhibition “2¼” at David Zwirner Gallery in London. He took the “2¼” photographs in California and throughout the American South following his groundbreaking solo exhibition at MoMA in 1976. The works in the “2¼” series are notable within Eggleston’s oeuvre for their distinct format. He shot the photographs using a two-and-one-quarter-inch medium-format camera, resulting in images that exist between the registers of portraiture and landscape, dissolving the boundaries between the two. The individuals, cars, parking lots, and local stores and businesses that the artist depicts in the series speak to the uniformity of postwar material culture while revealing the distinct character and idiosyncrasies of the people and places that populate the American landscape. Through Eggleston’s lens, a rusted-over Cadillac dealer’s sign becomes both a potent emblem of industrial decline and a lushly toned formalist colorscape of rich blues and bronzes. Vermeer-like, Eggleston exhibits a sensitivity to the powerful yet diffuse light that permeates these spaces. Several images from the series capture cars parked in litter-strewn lots, immersed within this special saturated glow. Many of the images in “2¼” series were first published as a monograph of the same title by Twin Palms in 1999. Several were also included in “Cadillac” a portfolio of 13 chromogenic prints that Eggleston produced the same year.
Info: David Zwirner Gallery, 24 Grafton Street London, Duration: 12/4-1/6/19, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.davidzwirner.com
