Previously unseen work by ‘the father of colour photography’ William Eggleston, the artist widely credited with securing recognition for colour photography as a legitimate contemporary art form, has been unveiled in a major new exhibition.
The exhibition entitled William Eggleston – Portraits 1974 is at Inverleith House at Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh until October 14 2007, and is the first show to be solely devoted to Eggleston’s colour photography. It features images that were captured by Eggleston during the most pivotal period in his career and which perfectly illustrate the aesthetic with which he has become famous.
William Eggleston was born in 1939 and raised on a cotton plantation in Mississippi. His interest in photography began at college after he was given a Leica camera by a friend. Early influences include the Swiss-born photographer Robert Frank and French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson.
His early work featured a large black and white format and depicted everyday country subjects, and although he continued to work in black and white it was his experiments in colour photography that was to really transform his work.
The exhibition features 24 large-format colour photographs, which measure 30x20 inches, and document scenes of day-to-day life in Memphis. All of the images were taken in 1974 but have only recently been printed for the first time.
The timing of this body of work is significant for a number of reasons. Just a year before these images were shot, Eggleston had come across a new colour printing technique, which until then had only been used in commercial photography work such as advertising.
The new technique was called dye-transfer printing and as soon as Eggleston saw the depth of colour saturation and quality of the ink that it afforded he was keen to apply it to his own work.
The photographs created during this initial period of experimentation were to form the basis of his groundbreaking show at the Museum of Modern Art in 1976 – a watershed moment in the history of photography which saw the acceptance of colour photography into the canon of Art.
It was in 1974 that Eggleston’s career began to take off in several directions. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and appointed Lecturer in Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University. He also presented his first solo exhibition in Washington DC and his photographs were first published as a limited-edition portfolio entitled 14 Pictures. The portfolio comprised of dry transfer prints.
It was also during this year that Eggleston began filming videotape footage for his film Stranded in Canton, which was not edited until 2005. At the time he was using a 5 x 7 camera to take black-and-white photographs of Memphis nightclubs, and he used the same machine to take colour shots during the daytime. It is these colour photographs, of the everyday scenes and people he came across, that are featured in this new exhibition.
It’s very evident to see in these 24 dry transfer prints why the new colour printing process got Eggleston so excited. A dry transfer print is produced from three separate negatives made by photographing the original negative through red, green and blue filters, and the result is a sumptuousness of colour that give the images a remarkable vibrancy.
The image of a woman standing on a road in a yellow dress is so fresh that it could easily have been taken yesterday, even though the fashion clearly dates it to the early 1970s. The colours are so rich and luxuriously saturated that the dress seems to actually glow – the treatment and texture seem more akin to abstract painting than portrait photography.
Again, in the three-quarter length portrait of a young man in a vivid pink t-shirt, Eggleston has managed to capture this painterly technique really well. Here, the man’s blond wavy hair looks as though it has been applied in a wonderfully free and loose brushstroke. The texture is so feathery and soft that it is hard to believe that this is really a photograph at all.
In another image, the head and shoulders shot of a black woman in a purple top is so solid as to give it an almost three-dimensional quality. It’s a masterstroke of Eggleston to shoot it in a dark setting, with the light source coming from above and in front of the subject to enhance the woman’s striking features. The darkness of the whole scene serves to somehow make the image even more impressive.
Eggleston’s ability to identify and accentuate the beautiful in the ordinary is truly exceptional. His has an unerring eye for colour and composition and as such enjoys a deserved reputation for creating monumental images of everyday life.
The exhibition is displayed throughout the seven rooms of the gallery under natural lighting and has been installed in collaboration with the artist.
