Exhibition of the week William Eggleston: Portraits
National Portrait Gallery, London WC2 (020-7306 0055, www.npg.org.uk). Until 23 October
It seems extraordinary to think there was ever a debate about the validity of colour photography as art, said Ben Luke in the London Evening Standard. Yet as recently as the 1970s, many considered the medium “frivolous” and unworthy of serious attention. At the “eye of the storm” was the “famously enigmatic” American photographer William Eggleston, whose images of life in the Deep South captured a “shifting world” in which the conservative traditions of the Bible Belt collided with “shiny modern motor cars”, fast-food joints and the trappings of youth culture. At the time, critics savaged his work for its “apparent banality”, but Eggleston had the last laugh. This new exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery brings together around 100 of his portraits from the 1960s to the present day. It includes many of his most famous images – among them some of the most “resonant” photographs ever taken – as well as a host of “unexpected gems”, and proves that he is “not just a great photographer but a great artist too”.
Championing colour from the mid1960s, when most art photographers shot only in black and white, Eggleston used a palette of “intense reds and washed-out greens” that make his photographs feel “not so much heated as sticky to the touch”, said Mark Hudson in The Daily Telegraph. “There’s a muggy, decadent quality to his images of beleaguered diners, gas stations and un-airconditioned bedrooms.” Born into a well-off Memphis family, he was a master of the Southern Gothic: you can see why David Lynch has cited him as a prime influence. But to make this a show of his portraits seems a bit odd. His best-known work isn’t devoid of people, but it tends to be the locations that stick in the mind, while the photographs he took of well-known figures – Joe Strummer, Eudora Welty – offer “little sense of the exploration of personality you associate with a real portrait”.
But the point about Eggleston’s work, said Adrian Searle in The Guardian, is that everything is a portrait – “less of a moment than of a place and an age”. A man “swallowing a burger and staring at it with a kind of avarice; a curator in a phone booth; a bloke on a bed; a woman alone at the side of a long and empty road; a girlfriend in tears – each photograph is freighted with untold stories”. In this marvellous, compact show, we see his parents’ housekeeper, making a bed; a teenager pushing trolleys outside a supermarket in the late afternoon sun; and his uncle, standing by his car with his black driver. These are ordinary events, but the photographs so capture their atmosphere and tension, they are extraordinary.
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