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William Eggleston In The Real World

2005, Movie, NR, 87 mins

William Eggleston In The Real World: Review

WILLIAM EGGLESTON IN THE REAL WORLD
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The extent of photographer William Eggleston's influence will be apparent to anyone who's seen a movie by Jonathan Demme, David Lynch or Gus Van Sant. Fans of '70s power-pop and '80s roots-rock will recognize his images from the covers of albums by Big Star and Green on Red. Photographers will understand exactly what curator John Szarkowski was talking about when, in his now-famous catalog essay for Eggleston's 1976 one-man show at the Museum of Modern Art — the first for a color photographer — he calls Eggleston's work "the beginning of modern color photography." Using a costly dye-transfer color process that imbues his photographs with a startling intensity, Eggleston's seemingly random, often fragmentary images capture the strange beauty and surprising power of the quotidian: the loneliness of a pair of ketchup bottles; the celestial luminosity of an airplane cocktail; the heroic upsweep of a beehive hairdo; the tragedy of a crumpled aluminum awning. The artifacts captured by Eggleston's "democratic camera" prove that everything, in the end, is worth looking at. Granted unprecedented access to this unassuming, soft-spoken Southern gentleman — an exterior as deceptively ordinary as his work — filmmaker Michael Almereyda follows Eggleston as he shoots and exhibits his work. The cross-country journey stretches from Mayfield, Ky., where Eggleston has agreed to take pictures of Van Sant's birthplace, to Eggleston's hometown of Memphis, where he spends a boozy night and woozy morning-after, to an exhibition of Eggleston's work at Los Angeles' J. Paul Getty Museum. After deciding upon the futility of using voice-over in a film about a photographer whose work transcends words (a sentiment echoed by the famously laconic Eggleston himself; when pressed to talk about the reality and impermanence of his images, he replies, "What is there to talk about?"), Almereyda alternates short, biographical sketches with his own perceptive, often poetic commentary on Eggleston's work. Almereyda also includes fascinating snippets from Eggleston's unfinished '70s video Stranded in Canton, in which he sought to chronicle two years of his life among the demimonde; Almereyda sees it as an important development in video art and a strikingly aggressive counterpoint to Eggleston's more-detached still work. Without slavishly imitating the photographer's distinctive style, Almereyda also manages to connect his own images to all that's "Egglestonian" in the photographer's world, from the length of toilet paper that sticks to Eggleston's shoe as he hobbles down a Kentucky main street to the pig-shaped neon "PORK" sign that forms a halo around his head. leave a comment --Ken Fox
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