Mystery of the Ordinary
William Eggleston
Early 2023 there was a major retrospective entitled William Eggleston: Mystery of the Ordinary at C/O Berlin. The same exhibition can be seen at the end of 2023 at the MAPFRE Foundation in Barcelona. As an overview and retrospective, this exhibition combines key aspects of Eggleston’s work.
A catalog accompanying the exhibition has been published by Steidl under the same title. William Eggleston‘s career has spanned over five decades. Mystery of the Ordinary captures the full scope of Eggleston’s evolution and legacy: from the early black-and-white work of the late 1950s to some of his most iconic colour images. The book brings together crucial elements in Eggleston’s work.
The following series are included in Mystery of the Ordinary.
Before Color (1963 – 1968). In his early career Eggleston was still influenced by the work of Walker Evans and Henri Cartier-Bresson. First photographing in black-and-white.
Los Alamos (1965 – 1974). Eggleston began experimenting with colour in 1965 and 1966. And colour transparency film became his dominant medium in the latter 1960s. Art photography and photojournalism were long dominated by black and white. Colour photography was reserved for the world of advertising and was considered commercial, vulgar and unartistic. By using colour, Eggleston went in a completely other direction than other photographers.
Los Alamos is one of his most famous series containing multiple iconic images. It consists of approximately 2.200 images taken between 1965 and 1974 when William Eggleston and Walter Hopps (an American museum director) drove together through the USA. The series contains his first ever colour photograph, Untitled, Memphis, 1965, which features a young grocer pushing shopping carts at a supermarket in Memphis, Tenessee. His purposeful manner of capturing a regular boy, with a regular job on a regular day sums up what the whole artwork is about, life today, uneembellished and unposed.
Another image from this series I really like is the one enjoying a cocktail on an airplane. There you are in an airplane, high above the clouds, with your glass catching a ray of sunshine. Leaving all your worries behind. For me it is the perfect image of escapism.
The Outlands (1969 – 1974). Photographs from this series showed Eggleston to John Szarkowski the then director of the Department of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Szarkowski made a selection from these photographs to show on the 1976 exhibition Photographs by William Eggleston. William Eggleston’s 1976 solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York was the first to showcase colour photography in a museum context. The accompanying catalog, William Eggleston’s Guide, has come to be recognized as a pivotal event in the medium’s acceptance in the art-historical canon. It firmly established Eggleston’s position as one of the leading proponents of the medium.
The last series is The Democratic Forest with pictures taken between 1983 and 1986.
There are also images from the collection from The Hasselblad Foundation and Fotomuseum Winterthur. Some of which already were included in William Eggleston’s Guide.
What strikes is Eggleston’s fascination for cultural codes which is visible in his images: ruins and buildings, neon signs, letterforms and billboards. A fascination he shares with Walker Evans and Robert Frank. Another aspect is the equal footing on which all sections of the pictorial plane are placed. The background and surroundings are as important as the subject. And for his choice of subject: Eggleston has recognized the beauty and mystery in the commonplace.
Mystery of the Ordinary
Photographer: William Eggleston
Publisher: Steidl
Published in 2023
Hardback, clothbound, 24 x 30 cm, 208 pages
Essays by Felix Hoffmann, Jörg Sasse & Thomas Weski