William Eggleston Show

[paulr]

Adrian is right; it was a huge risk for Szarkowski at the time. He got mostly negative criticism (some of it completely scathing). The show seemed to be a bit ahead of its time, and Szarkowski's and the museum's reputations suffered for it in the short term. But Szarkowski never backed down from his belief in the work, and gradually over the decades most of the critical voices came to agree with him.

Now Szarkowski is gone, and Eggleston is firmly cannonized, and being rediscovered by new generations of artists all the time. It's safe to say Maris has it backwards; what appeared at first to be Szarkowski's biggest mistake has from a long perspective turned out to be one of American photography's greatest success stories.

[Drew Wiley]

Trying to compare Eggleston and Porter is really, really mixing apples and oranges.
Porter shot 4x5 and made many of his own dye transfer prints until he had an assistant; Eggleston was a 35mm snapshooter who didn't pay a lot of attention immaculate focus, and didn't make his own prints. But in his own time, Porter was considered quite a revolutionary color composer. This fact seems to lost upon those who now see something of his style widely copied. Yet he had a number of his own
detractors. For me personally, Eggleston's charm starts falling apart either when he
went to medium format or when the prints have gone digital. Something of a rough
spontaneity seems essential to make his images viable. Stephen Shore was a totally
different kind of bird - almost everything he did was based upon a simple and relatively
obnoxious simultaneous contrast of Vericolor's infamous pumpkin orange and sickly cyan. Just look at the prints! Fascinating how he pulled it off, but otherwise a very
monotonous color cliche which looked novel in the 70's. Meyerowitz managed to stretch the gamut of Vericolor much further, after a lot of hit and miss experimentation. (Not critisizing the subject matter - just pointing out the chromatic
strategy - dye transfer allowed many more options.)

[mcfactor]

I think the problem with Eggleston's digital work is that its printed too large, rather than the fact that they are printed digitally. Certain feelings of intimacy are lost when his (signature style) images are printed larger than, say 16x20. I really like his 5x7 color portraits, which happen to be printed digitally and very large. The image of a man in a red shirt and black tie and jacket is great (and a beautiful print).

I disagree with your Shore comments, Drew. His images certainly went farther than blue-orange contrasts. Even if you find his images cliche compared to color images now, a photographer like AA would certain fall to the same criticism (of being cliche).

Overall, it seems you are mixing up printing with content. Shore's use of orange and blue is a content choice, rather than a printing one. Even if Shore had used the dye-transfer process, he would have ended up with orange and blue contrasts, simply because those are (some of) the colors he photographed. His recent retrospective was composed of (i believe) lightjet prints that maintained his original color-vision (more than simply blue-orange) and looked quite original even by today's standards.

[Drew Wiley]

Photographers didn't just go around seeing a world full of orange and blue; rather, they
became imprinted by what their medium was capable of. A lot of work of the 70's
revolved around the way Vericolor took to the C-papers of the time. Some of it was pretentious and some of it was elegant. Eggleston had many of his own color negative
images printed using DT pan matrix film, which has a far wider color gamut. These were
commercially made in limited editions, and some of the casualness or softness is due to
the dyes bleeding a little -typical of this kind of production. Of course, nowadays the
prints are going to made digitally, simply because very few people are left who can do
the pan matrix process, and their stockpiles of supplies are almost extinct. A person who has come up with a hybrid process is Egbert Haneke in Germany. His images are
somewhat reminiscent of Eggleston's, though patterned to modern European rather
than Southern themes. The original is scanned, then the digital file is used to expose
the 20x24 matrices by blue laser. After that, the printing sequence resumes according to the traditional dye transfer method.

[paulr]

Drew, I've been drooling over Shore's prints, in books and gallery and museum walls, for years now. I honestly don't know what you're talking about. His use of color has always struck me as a marvel of subtlety.

I have more sympathy for Eggleston detractors who say his colors are just too much. I get what they mean ... especially with some of the original dye transfers, which had such hyper saturated colors you might wonder if they were a gimmic. But they worked for me.

With shore, though, I see nothing overblown and nothing I can imagine being taken as formulaic. Maybe there are bodies of work of his that I haven't seen in person.

[Drew Wiley]

I wasn't critisizing Shore's work at all - just pointing out his color strategy and how it
developed as a response to the film he used. I find his work intriguing too, although my
own style is utterly unrelated. One of the things great photographers have always done is learn the limitations and idiosyncracies of their given medium. Less can be more. I'm afraid that the greatest weakness for many nowadays is the lack of restraint, because digital seems to offers endless options (someone will certainly pounce on me for this comment). Eggleston's work required dye transfer to come alive.
Today digital printing can duplicate some of DT's gamut advantages, but certainly not all. But originally, Eggleston's work was regarded as "non-color" color - bland and
unsaturated! In such case, I think people today tend to add a factor of nostalgia to
certain themes he was engaged with, which he seemed to play upon right from the
start.

[QT Luong]

Wasn't the hypersaturation of some of the Eggleston prints quite novel in the 70s ? It's not that you could just push the saturation slider in PS back then. Even in the commercial world, it seems that before David LaChapelle, color did not that often get "over the top".

[adrian tyler]

i'm with paul here, a couple of years ago my framers called me and said "you have to come and see these" "these" were 2 boxes of lightjet prints for a major shore retrospective here in madrid.

i spent the day leafing through the boxes before they were framed and mounted, and the hue was in no way contrasted in any of the primaries, if anything slightly subdued, very very subtle, beleivable and would hold up today alongside anything i've seen...

[Drew Wiley]

QT - compared to the dye transfer work being done back then, and even the last years of carbro, Eggleston's prints were critisized as being completelely bland. People like Meyerowitz, Shore, and Misrach came along who seemed to flaunt the unsaturated characteristics of the the C-print, and the public perception of saturation changed. Everything is relative, and things go in cycles. And photographers themselves inevitably tend to see the world through the film and print process they use. As far as the ability to saturate a print, the dye transfer process still is at the
head of the pack, with the possible exception of color carbon.

[Drew Wiley]

An afterthought - there were a few early Eggleston images where he deliberately wanted an almost lurid, sinister, other-wordly effect. This would explain the high level
of saturation in certain cases.