William Eggleston earned the epithet ‘the father of colour photography’ thanks to his groundbreaking 1976 show at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. It dragged colour photography away from the commercial and advertising worlds and into the gallery, and Eggleston did more than any photographer before him to excise any doubts about the format’s status in a fine art context.
Three decades on, such doubts seem rather absurd, but it only takes a few moments in the company of his images to understand why they had such an impact.
Step into the light-filled galleries at Inverlieth House, and these never-before-seen prints offer an immediate, sometimes shocking blast of pure colour - the hot, flat blue skies of Eggleston’s native Southern States, and the lurid palette of mid-70s fashion - and a wealth of subtler tones, especially of his subjects’ skin, from sallow off-whites to deep browns.
Step closer, and there’s another shock to be found in quality of the prints, and in Eggleston’s skill with the camera. Every pore on a face is visible, as is every strand of hair on a head, and, thanks in part to subtle tricks with depth of focus, some portraits give a distinctly three-dimensional impression - the image of young black woman in a purple dress, for example, seems about to rise up from the blurred backdrop behind her.
This takes some getting used to. At first, the temptation is to examine every detail, to wonder at the mysteries of technique. But, before long, it becomes clear that Eggleston’s work is profoundly human, above all about everyday people and the places they inhabit.
Once the barrier put in place by the quality of the photographs has been overcome, it is impossible to avoid conjuring up a romantic back-story for Eggleston’s subjects. The faded beauty gazing off into the distance has surely loved and lost, the Johnny Cash-a-like with dandruff in his quiff might well have shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die, and the piggy-eyed president of the Tex Ritter fan-club must be the product of a union between first cousins.
It is more tempting still to wonder about the precise, decisive moment at which Eggleston released the shutter. Thanks to the unwieldy nature of his bulky 5 x 7 camera, a type more usually confined to the photographic studio, Eggleston did not have the luxury of firing off shot after shot to capture these perfect portraits: more often than not his images are the result of a single exposure. And so the half-smile that plays across the face of the girl with too much make-up on, or the defiant stare of the kid, proudly cradling a transistor radio must have been, at least in part, Eggleston’s doing, making these works both portraits and records of a relationship, however brief.
In the end, while this exhibit might lack the blockbusting appeal of Warhol at the National Galleries, or the exhaustive survey of Picasso at the Dean Gallery, it stands alongside those shows as the best the Edinburgh Art Festival has to offer.
This review was first published in The Herald in August, 2007.