'Democratic Camera: Photographs and Video 1961-2008' Whitney Museum of American Art, November 7, 2008 - January 25, 2009

(originally published on artslant.com 12/2/08)

William Eggleston is one of those rare artists who hijacks your brain; his astounding body of work, on display in William Eggleston: Democratic Camera, through January 25th at the Whitney, asserts a view of the world so convincing, it overtakes your own. His photographs, sensual, strange, and eye-popping, evoke a hyper-real America that is not just visual, but tactile and poetic. It’s a world populated by shellacked chickens, ecstatic soda pop and hot gravel roads; muddy puddles and humble ice chests; people with the kinds of faces that don’t exist anymore.

The democracy of Eggleston’s vision is established at the entrance to the exhibition, where several of his most enduring works from the 1970s are hung together—Algiers, Louisiana; Sumner, Mississippi, Cassidy Bayou in Background; and Greenwood, Mississippi. In each, Eggleston’s peculiar mood prevails, whether he’s photographing a sunny afternoon or a dark red room.

From there, most of the works on view are grouped according to his various projects—William Eggleston’s Guide, Los Alamos, Graceland, and so on. Within these series are smaller narratives and perverse juxtapositions. A stark, funereal photograph of a corpse is hung next to a rapturous redhead splayed in the grass (both untitled). A group of three prints (all Sumner, Mississippi c. 1969-71, from William Eggleston’s Guide) illustrates an evening spent menaced by black doorways, hot pink meat, and red lampshades in a tilted Southern house. More recent works, dated 1999 to 2001, feature closely-cropped compositions and abstract blocks of color, and form a nice bookend to Eggleston’s grainy black & white prints from the 1960s.

Eggleston’s video work, shot in the 1970s with a Sony Portapak camera, is the most intriguing aspect of Democratic Camera. The black & white character studies that comprise Stranded in Canton, playing on several monitors arranged in a circle and accompanied by still portraits from his 5x7 series, are focused on individuals, stripped of any sharply defined setting and shot in hazy bar light — in short, unlike anything else in the exhibition. Yet they are the key to the rest of Eggleston’s work, providing insight into the eccentric milieu that shaped this artist’s vision so that he in turn could captivate ours.