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    Mapping The Democratic Forest: The Postsouthern Spaces of William Eggleston: An article from Southern Cultures 17:2, The Photography Issue
    Mapping The Democratic Forest: The Postsouthern Spaces of William Eggleston: An article from Southern Cultures 17:2, The Photography Issue
    Mapping The Democratic Forest: The Postsouthern Spaces of William Eggleston: An article from Southern Cultures 17:2, The Photography Issue
    Ebook41 pages13 minutes

    Mapping The Democratic Forest: The Postsouthern Spaces of William Eggleston: An article from Southern Cultures 17:2, The Photography Issue

    By Ben Child

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    Eggleston, the iconoclastic and colorful groundbreaker, imbues the mundane with vibrancy.This article appears in the Summer 2011 issue of Southern Cultures:The Photography Issue. "When the color photographs of William Eggleston first appeared at the Museum of Modern Art in 1976, the boldness of Eggleston's palette and his disregard for the conventions of black-and-white photography were shocking; nearly all the major critics were scornful, and Ansel Adams wrote a scathing letter of protest."

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUNC Center for the Study of the American South
    Release dateJun 1, 2011
    ISBN9780807882443
    Mapping The Democratic Forest: The Postsouthern Spaces of William Eggleston: An article from Southern Cultures 17:2, The Photography Issue
    Author

    Ben Child

    Ben Child is a PhD student in English at the University of Mississippi whose research interests include intersections between vernacular culture and modernism, and constructions of urbanity and rurality. His work has appeared in Popular Music and Society and The Journal of Popular Culture. He is also a frequent contributor to PopMatters.com.

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      Book preview

      Mapping The Democratic Forest - Ben Child

      ESSAY

      Mapping The Democratic Forest

      The Postsouthern Spaces of William Eggleston

      by Ben Child

      "I’m taking pictures of life today."

      —William Eggleston

      One influence William Eggleston’s photography acknowledges is Walker Evans’s, an artist whose work also searches out the everyday corners of his cultural milieu. Evans’s approach is marked by a leveling of discriminations, between the beautiful and the ugly, the important and trivial. Vicksburg, Mississippi, 1936, by Walker Evans, courtesy of the Collections of the Library of Congress.

      When the color photographs of William Eggleston first appeared at the Museum of Modern Art in 1976, they had no clear antecedents. The boldness of Eggleston’s palette and his disregard for the conventions of black-and-white photography were shocking; nearly all the major critics were scornful, and Ansel Adams wrote a scathing letter of protest to curator John Szarkowski, baldly calling Eggleston a put on. Using a dye-transfer printing method primarily associated with advertising, Eggleston’s images draw out the deep, frequently striking tonal potentials of natural colors. But within the tradition of photography, as critic Peter Schjeldahl succinctly notes in his essay on Eggleston, color befuddles—and Eggleston’s colors certainly did. One influence Eggleston’s photography acknowledges, however, is Walker Evans, an artist whose work also searches out the everyday corners of his cultural milieu. Evans’s approach is marked by an expansive, Whitmanesque vision that Susan Sontag describes as a leveling of discriminations, between the beautiful and the ugly, the important and trivial. And yet, in On Photography, Sontag finds little use for Evans’s ambitions. Photography, she holds, is no longer required to be literate, authoritative, transcendent, as Evans hoped it might be, and his photos could never achieve the transcendence they aspire to in the contemporary world, where

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