William Eggleston
Los Alamos at the MET
The easy conversation is the one about an artist’s influences. It’s the one where writers and critics behave as though artists are collages of recycled sensory detail, or a cocktail of, say, David Lynch-meets-Baroque-pageboy. The longer an artist is active, the higher the likelihood that publications will make a game of tracking their creativity like it was some precious, nomadic virgin – skittish, and too personal to capture without considerable effort.
Profiles of William Eggleston abound in photography tomes; he’s been named the Daddy of Color Photography as we know it, and after his near six decades in the industry it would be easy to address his upcoming show, Los Alamos, with the same easy, historical reverence as every other publication out there is bound to do.
But PROVOKR isn’t interested in easy unless we’re talking about sexual habits, in which case it’s all negotiable.
Instead, let’s strip down to the most arousing elements of Los Alamos and what downreaching desires it invites you to indulge.
The Retro Fetish
Hard-edged, grainy, and clad in 100% polyester, this show will appeal to the part of you that covertly wants to screw Don Draper. The unmistakable zeitgeist of the ‘60s throws you around in bed, calls you by that politically incorrect nickname you secretly love, and takes liquor neat.
The Deflowerer
“Los Alamos includes the artist’s first color photograph—Untitled, Memphis, 1965—a study of a young clerk pushing a train of shopping carts at a supermarket in Memphis, Tennessee,” reveals to the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Press Office. “The image takes full advantage of the chromatic intensity of the dye-transfer color process that, until Eggleston appropriated it in the 1960s, had been used primarily by commercial photographers for advertising and product photography.”
The Color Thirst
Soulful, nourishing, not just wet – saturated. The colors in Eggleston’s work result from a dye-transfer process that had the world shook at its introduction. In one untitled piece, he captures a tremendous aquamarine pole veined with red wires. Maybe it’s in the eye of the beholder, but we could swear it looks like the base of a familiar toy…
The Seedy Sort
In “Untitled – Bed With Lights,” Eggleston notices the mood of an empty room. The photograph captures the kind of fluorescent light that puts down a loud enough bed of white noise to drown out any moaning about to disrupt the bed’s pristine condition. If you like to watch, do it covertly in public places, or have ever considered the mile high club, you’ll find this photograph resonant.
For all the saturated glory PROVOKR sees in this show, in truth, Eggleston’s deep-rooted influence on the photography world cannot be overstated, and Los Alamos grounds his position with a backward glance that can legitimately claim he was there before retro was retro, before retro was cool. Take a look for yourself.
Los Alamos opens on February 14, 2018 and runs through May 18 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
