William Eggleston, Living Color
PDN magazine checks in with one of the most celebrated photographers of our time.

Those asked to interview William Eggleston are usually given a few halting words of advice:

He has little patience for the canned questions of critics and journalists.

He'll refuse to meet in person, and won't tolerate any abstract or philosophical discussion of his work.

He certainly does not want to have his picture taken.

Photos by William Eggleston

With a reputation as the photography world's J.D. Salinger, Eggleston has long been considered as elusive and enigmatic as his images. But when PDN finally got him on the phone as he returned from one of his frequent cigarette breaks, he couldn't have been more charming and straightforward.

When he wouldn't, or couldn't, answer a question, he was more matter-of-fact than evasive. And when he was asked once and for all whether or not he thought it was accurate to call him the "father of color photography" as he has been described so many times *before,

Without hesitation, he replied, "yes, I think that's fair."

Not that anyone else ever had any doubt about that. Photographers like Harry Callahan and Edward Weston might have experimented with color processes, but Eggleston's work in the early 1960's and 70's was not just taken in color, it reflected on the very idea of color. In 1976 MOMA curator John Szarkowski famously described Eggleston's gorgeously hypperreal images of the deepest South as "visual analogues for the quality of one's life. A view one would have thought ineffable described here with clarity, fullness, and elegance."

More to the point, he simply called them "perfect."

His uneasy psychology of his private, inchoate images opened the door to a kind of photography that hadn't been tapped before. The emotional world of photographers like Joel Sternfeld or Martin Parr (not to mention their color) seem somehow impossible without William Eggleston.

At the same time, the influence of his Southern landscapes can be felt in works as diverse as Andreas Guskey's sprawling color tableaux to the new topographies of Richard Misrach.

Eggleston is more than willing to talk about these and other contemporary photographers. He speaks fondly of the work of Cindy Sherman, Philip Lorca diCorcia, Mitch Epstein, and Adam Bartos. When pressed about which photographers he doesn't like, he replies with a gruff "most of them."

Is there a style or movement that rubs him the wrong way?

"No."

Does he think there was something culturally that was influencing the world of photography and might be contributing to a dearth of decent work?

"I don't know," he bellowed. "I'm not god!"

Fair enough. Eggleston describes himself as "an artist, but not part of the art world." In the same contrary spirit, he's lived for years in Memphis, the birthplace of rock and roll, counts David Byrne and Bob Dylan amongst his close friends, and yet feels most akin to Johann Sebastian Bach.

"My work has a lot more in common with classical music," he says, declining to elaborate further. Eggleston is also a composer himself who spends more time writing and performing his work for piano and synthesizer than following the business of print sales which he leaves to his representatives at Cheim & Read in Manhattan and Rose Gallery in Santa Monica.

While he says he was "practically giving away" his work in the 1970s, a portfolio of 14 Memphis images by Eggleston was purchased for a record $152,000 at a Phillips dePury and Luxembourg auction in October. Numbers like that put Eggleston in the photo auction world's top ranks with Man Ray, Paul Strand, and Dorthea Lange. Had he followed that?

Eggleston said no. "I don't much keep up with that sort of thing," he said in his customary slow, throaty drawl. "My mind is cluttered with what I'm working on at any given time."

Indeed, it's hard to keep Eggleston's schedule straight these days. Back in Memphis after a trip to St. Petersburg photographing "anything," he's off to Tuscany the day after this interview to meet with a French documentary crew who have been filming him over the past several months for a feature-length documentary tentatively titled "Eggleston Suite."

He is also accepting commissions, albeit only the ones that gives him complete artistic control. "I demand that," he says. Eggleston has recently accepted assignments that have taken him to Kyoto, Berlin and Queens. In 1982 he paid a visit to the set of the movie-version of the Broadway musical "Annie" where, astonishingly, he, Gary Winogrand, and Joel Meyerowitz photographed on and off-set of the production. (The resulting book, Annie On-Camera turns up on eBay from time to time.) In the future, he plans on returning to St Petersberg when it's warmer and will "probably do some work in Cairo. We'll see what happens."

Until then, his famous "Guide" is back in print from DAP (and nearly identical to the original edition) and this March, 88 prints from his Los Alamos series (taken on road trips through the South from 1964-68 and 1972-74) most never seen before, will be published in book form by Scalo, and will go on display at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne. Later they will travel in Europe and the United States.

The prints for the book and exhibit are both being made using the dye-transfer process he popularized for use in the art world. Advertising people loved dye-transfers in the 40s, 50s, 60s, and 70s for their retouchability and gorgeous range of colors and tone. Eggleston explains why he was drawn to it: "I knew about it as 'the ultimate process,' but it had only been used before in advertising, like in a fancy ad or a cover for Vogue or something,” says Eggleston. “They'd use that process for the final print, because you could control the colors separately. I thought, well, with this great process I'd like to see what an ‘Eggleston’ would look like. After the first one, I knew that it was perfect for me to work in."

Guy Stricherz, who owns CVI Lab in Manhattan with his wife Irene Malli is making all 88 prints for the exhibition and book for Eggleston, a special event in itself given that Kodak stopped manufacturing the papers and chemicals necessary to produce dye transfers in 1992, when it was no longer cost-effective. Stricherz says he acquired a large stock of materials when the process was discontinued, but that he only has enough to last him the next 4-6 years.

Fittingly, this makes Eggleston's prints both the first and the last of the fine-art dye transfers. As Stricherz, quoting Caldecot Chubb, the executive director of Eggleston's Trust, puts it: "We're 19th century craftspeople working in a 20th century medium in the 21st century."

"That's exactly right," agrees Eggleston. "Absolutely."

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