William Eggleston at The Art Institute of Chicago

by Amy Lin

The beloved Polaroid was laid to rest in 2008, even as Terry Richardson, Juergen Teller, lomography and camera phone snaps established the snapshot aesthetic as de rigueur, shirking painfully-composed studio-type shots in favor of an spontaneous, everyman effortlessness. Ryan McGinnis’ work with its clouds of lush artificial smoke, is at its core about the surprise moment when everything clicks. Call it backlash against the dishonesty of digital; Photoshop has replaced darkroom alchemy, a few tweaks can simulate the blurry charm of SX-70 film and you can make as many identical prints as you like.

No conversation on snapshots would be complete without mentioning William Eggleston, that figurehead of Kodak point-and-shoot color photography. David Lynch and Sofia Coppola, whose bodies of work deal with unveiling the extraordinary in the ordinary, both cite Eggleston as an influence (Charlotte in Coppola’s Lost in Translation wryly notes that every budding girl photographer goes through a phase where she photographs her feet). Spoon used Sumner, Miss 1969 as the cover art for their recent album Transference (joining fellow Egglestoners Big Star, Silver Jews, Jimmy Eat World and Joanna Newsom).

Eggleston’s work is deceptively simple: the point of focus is for the most part dead-center, the subject matter is banal (shoes, toys, the types of forgettable faces that melt into crowds), possessing neither diamond-in-the-rough beauty nor backroads beastliness. There’s no aggressive symbolism; indeed, there’s no agenda beyond snapping pictures. In Eggleston’s work the mundane never transforms into the fantastic, yet the images are powerful enough to warrant lingering. The viewer line in the gallery the day I attended moved at a snail’s pace; most people at some point spent a few minutes nose-to-glass with the work.

His photographs captivate in a way that homegrown snapshots, though similarly composed and featuring equally blasé subjects, rarely do. The dye imbibition technique he used for printing lends a richness that drugstore printers can’t (this contrast is even evidenced in Eggleston’s digital prints which at first glance seem woefully out of place). He has an undeniably good eye for texture, color and framing. Still, the work sticks in the mind longer than you’d expect and it is really hard to capture that Eggleston quality at home, even using his techniques (try it).

The show was packed with a motley crew of twenty-somethings, older people who had lived through the sixties and seventies, and families with young children. A few snippets of the conversations from that day:

“Hey Jen, it’s you!” (middle-aged woman to friend from across the room, indicating woman in photo)

“I like this one.” (thirteenish boy pulling older boy over – referring either to the girl or the grill)

“I had that car.” (fiftyish man to companion)

“I think I should start wearing ties with Oxford shirts like this kid. It’s a great look.” (my mid-twenties companion to me)

There’s something for everyone and perhaps that’s the key to the work’s enduring appeal. Eggleston’s camera goes for leisurely walks at sunset through main streets and old buildings (or Tokyo malls), blinking its shutter when it happens upon a shimmering curtain of hair, the condensation on a rooftop, or the visual chuckle of a ketchup bottle blending into the red paint job behind it. It’s the type of looking that happens in those brief moments when the mind is fully present and open, unfettered by anxieties and to-do lists, when time becomes irrelevant. The result is a photograph that doesn’t aim to capture a fleeting moment (no perfect sunsets to save for later viewing) so much as it pauses and immortalizes a time like paintings can do.  There is plenty of psychological room for us to enter the picture, walk around and settle in a familiar dream chair to ruminate and take in the surroundings.

The retrospective at the Art Institute covers an impressive chunk of Eggleston’s opus, including William Eggleston’s Guide, the Los Alamos series, Election Eve, The Democratic Forest, black and white, digital and video works. For more information, go to The Art Institute’s website.