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William Eggleston’s photos of Big Star
09.01.2016
08:56 am
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It’s difficult today to conceive of how William Eggleston’s photography was once considered controversial—he documented everyday scenes that, through his eyes, became vivid and surreal. The luridness of his color—and the very fact that he worked in color—provoked a rejection of his work in certain very, very serious artperson circles, but those lurid colors were essential to his work’s effectiveness. He intentionally used the most saturated process available at the time—the dye transfer—to achieve the eye-bleedy reds that practically became his trademark. And in 1976, a solo exhibit at MoMA by the self taught Memphis-based shooter William Eggleston, titled “Color Photographs,” turned American photography on its ear.

Like Eggleston, that great legend among influential but underachieving American rock bands Big Star hailed from Memphis, TN. And their connection to the photographer wasn’t just geographical—not only did his photo “The Red Ceiling” appear on the cover of that band’s 1974 LP Radio City, a candid portrait he shot of the band adorns the back cover.
 

 
It wasn’t very hard for the band to score that coup—Eggleston was a family friend to the band’s singer/guitarist Alex Chilton, and accordingly, thirty Eggleston shots appear in the band’s first ever photo-monograph, the forthcoming Big Star—Isolated in the Light, to be published in October by First Third Books. According to Big Star’s bassist Andy Hummel (RIP 2010), quoted in the book from a 2001 interview by Jason Gross originally appearing in Perfect Sound Forever,

Alex knew Bill Eggleston through his parents I believe. His mother was an art dealer and Bill, of course was a very gifted local photographer. Bill was a major hell raiser, as were Alex and me at the time. We drank a lot, stayed out all night, and took all manner of drugs. Somehow we got hooked up with him and Alex talked him into doing the cover [of Radio City]. I could go on and on about Bill’s techniques and all, which were truly innovative and brilliant, and which I kind of made note of, being very much into photography myself, but I’m sure there are lots of books available that deal with all that now that he’s world famous and all. But we wound up at the TGI Friday’s on Overton Square one Monday night, which was “Rock’n’Roll Night.” It was a major hell-raising scene in those days. A DJ would play old 45’s and just everyone came and stuffed the place. That was the back cover. Then we went over to Bill’s later on and he suggested the light on the ceiling pic, which he had previously taken. We all loved it and I thought it fit perfectly with the sort of avant-garde nature of the LP.

A close friend of the band, Michael O’Brien, has since become a highly reputable photographer himself, noted for portraiture and documentia; he’s published three monographs, The Face of Texas, The Great Minds of Investing, and the book of his most likely to be of interest to DM readers, Hard Ground, which pairs portraits of homeless subjects with poetry by Tom Waits. In Isolated in the Light, he recalls how his exposure (no pun) to Eggleston via their mutual association with Big Star altered the course of his life.

I remember hearing tales from Alex about this mysterious and eccentric photographer, William Eggleston, who was a friend of the Chilton family. I may have seen him at Alex’s house before – perhaps at the famous New Year’s Eve party that Alex’s parents threw each year – but my first definite memory was when I was becoming interested in photography and Alex suggested we drop by Eggleston’s house on Central Ave.

Shy, introverted and avoidant, I tried to change Alex’s mind but to no avail. In no time we were sitting in Eggleston’s living room. At least we were in a group and I wouldn’t stand out. A patrician, sharply intelligent Eggleston led the conversation. I lurked on the periphery and saw a copy of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s The Decisive Moment on the coffee table. Quickly I picked up the book and hid behind its pages. It was my first exposure to the French photographer’s work. I thumbed through the images. Boom! It hit me; this is exactly what I wanted to do.

Looking at Eggleston’s images of Big Star, I think back to Memphis in the 1970s. There was such a confluence of artistic energy thriving on the fringes of this Deep South provincial town. Now, with the benefit of years, I see how Big Star was the commonality… the force that energized the photographers, the recording engineers, and fans. We all had our own voice but Big Star energized us.

The image [below] of Andy, Jody and Alex – it’s such a perfect Eggleston image, recording the scene’s convulsive color and fragmented pattern! It’s like a volcanic eruption–the draperies, Andy’s shirt, Jody’s jacket, even the little watchband against Alex’s shirt. All the colors are assaulting one another – nothing is in concert – yet, the image is a perfect document.

 

 
Big Star—Isolated in the Light features photography not just from Eggleston, but from O’Brien, that great documenter of the people of the Mississippi Delta Maude Schuyler Clay, David Bell (brother of Big Star Guitarist Chris Bell), and even Andy Hummel, among others. All photos were restored from original negatives, transparencies and prints. The book features interviews with the photographers, musicians influenced by Big Star including members of This Mortal Coil, the Posies, and The Pixies, and with the sole living member of Big Star, drummer Jody Stephens.

Clicking on all the images in this post—apart from the album art—will reveal a higher-res version.
 

Eggleston and Jody Stephens
 
More after the jump…

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Posted by Ron Kretsch
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09.01.2016
08:56 am
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Like ‘Gummo’ with real people: William Eggleston’s ultra weird ‘Stranded in Canton’
02.13.2013
12:53 pm
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The work of the great American photographer William Eggleston focuses in on the mundane. Famous Eggleston images include the contents of his refrigerator, the ceiling of a friend’s house, parking lots, old trucks, old houses. Ordinary stuff.

The beholder of his art sees what Eggleston’s eye saw as he has gone about his grand five-decade project of documenting the American South, but his quirky choices (photography is as much about framing as editing, of course) become amplified by his hand-dyed magic in the darkroom. Eggleston’s work is all about capturing the vividly ordinary moment.
 
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Many admirers of his work feel that Eggleston’s main strength is his use of color, that the colors are the most important thing, but I’m not one of them. Eggleston is much more than that, as his sprawling, deeply weird B&W 1974 video work, Stranded in Canton demonstrates. He’s the ultimate ethnographer of the South.
 
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Shot using one of those (huge, by today’s standards) B&W Sony Porta-Pak units, the kind where the deck was slug over the operator’s shoulder, Stranded in Canton was basically just footage that Eggleston shot of people he knew. Eggleston equipped his camera with an infra-red video tube so he could shoot in dark places without lights, and this is what gives the handheld video its glowing, otherworldly quality.

The dreamlike 77-minute-long Canton achieves an accidental narrative as it drifts from one scene of Southern Gothic weirdness to another. Hard-drinking rednecks staggering around on Quaaludes, a low rent Memphis drag queen by the name of “Lady Russell Bates-Simpson” mugs for the camera, sauntering around a working-class bar; a couple loudly argues; Alex Chilton appears; so does blues singer Furry Lewis; a geek bites off the head of a live chicken. Jerry Lee Lewis and Elvis Presley even make cameo appearances. Stranded in Canton ends with a totally wasted Jerry McGill, the bank-robbing country singer, playing Russian roulette with his pistol as someone makes a guitar noise that sounds like Sonic Youth.

It’s a very strange trip, indeed. Obviously it was a huge influence on Harmony Korine (as he has said himself many times).

35 years after its initial screenings, the obscure Stranded in Canton, was revisited and remastered—with a wonderful anecdotal narration in Eggleston’s deep Southern drawl—for the Whitney Museum’s survey of his work in 2008. There’s a great coffee table book about Stranded in Canton, too, with a DVD of the film, extra footage, blown-up frames from the video and an essay by Gus Van Sant.
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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02.13.2013
12:53 pm
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William Eggleston: ‘Stranded in Canton’ screening at Cinefamily in Los Angeles
11.01.2010
03:03 pm
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This Tuesday night, a very unique program at the Cinefamily movie theater in Hollywood: In conjunction with the big exhibit at LACMA, “William Eggleston: Democratic Camera – Photographs and Video, 1961-2008” there’ll be a screening of Eggleston’s seldom seen B&W video work, Stranded in Canton:
 

 

Legendary photographer William Eggleston, working with filmmaker Robert Gordon, recently edited thirty hours of video footage he’d shot in 1974 of friends, family, and eclectic characters encountered in the bars and back roads of his hometown of Memphis, as well as New Orleans and the Delta region. The hypnotic result is Stranded in Canton, a film that consistently teeters on the edge of dream and nightmare states. Its nocturnal visions of bar denizens, musicians (including Furry Lewis), transvestites and a variety of semi-crazies comes off like a Cassavetes all-nighter filmed by David Lynch at his most unsettling: faces loom out of darkness, shot in infrared, displaying pale glowing skin and deep black eyes. There’s even a real-life geek-off (yes, the type with chickens)! And it’s mesmerizing, partly thanks to the outsized characters who fill the screen, and partly because Eggleston turns the “home movie” into art—Father of Modern Color Photography he may be, but he kicks just as much ass in eerie B&W, wrenching glorious images out of the early Sony Porta-Pak to conjure a febrile, desperate atmosphere that captures the Southern Gothic with an extraordinarily raw and rambling intimacy.

11/2, 8pm Tickets - $12/$8 for members

Below,footage from Stranded in Canton of Alex Chilton and Sid Selvidge playing “My Rival” in Memphis, TN.
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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11.01.2010
03:03 pm
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William Eggleston: American Eye
10.23.2010
01:23 pm
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William Eggleston is one of America’s most important and influential photographers, who “secured color photography as a legitimate artictic medium for display in galleries.”

This candid interview with photographer William Eggleston was conducted by film director Michael Almereyda on the occasion of the opening of Eggleston’s retrospective William Eggleston: Democratic Camera, Photographs and Video, 1961-2008 at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

A key figure in American photography, Eggleston is credited almost single-handedly with ushering in the era of color photography. Eggleston discusses his shift from black and white to color photography in this video as, “it never was a conscious thing. I had wanted to see a lot of things in color because the world is in color.” Also included in this video are Eggleston’s remarks about his personal relationships with the subjects of many of his photographs.

Michael Almereyda is director of the film William Eggleston and the Real World (2005).

 

 

Posted by Paul Gallagher
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10.23.2010
01:23 pm
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