Last chance to see - William Eggleston at LACMA

The scene couldn’t be more prosaic: a young man is pushing a train of supermarket shopping carts through a suburban parking lot in Anytown, U.S.A. But through the lens of the photographer William Eggleston, the boy becomes something more. The warm late afternoon light sets his hair and skin afire; his profile is perfectly replicated by a shadow thrown on the pale brick wall of the building behind him. An out-of-focus female shopper intrudes from the cool blue edge of the frame, but no matter - Eggleston’s gaze is intent, and so is ours. We are in thrall to this teenage Adonis as he ushers his silver chariots across the frame.

William Eggleston’s color-saturated photographs turn the familiar into the foreign, the mundane into the marvelous. Over the past five decades, he has used the camera as a democratic device, recording the ordinariness of life in America, particularly in the South, and finding something thrilling, enigmatic, scintillating in the smallest detail or the composition of characters in space: a dog lapping from a puddle, two women on a couch, a luridly blood-red basement ceiling like something out of a horror film (I think of Stephen King’s Carrie). When Eggleston began using color film in the 1960s, he was roundly panned for his images of what critics called the boring and the banal; now he is championed as the man who brought about a revolution with the use of color in art photography.

Against the puritan backdrop of an art world where almost all photography was still done in black-and-white, Eggleston dared to be vulgar by choosing to use color film - that tacky, workaday medium of billboard ads and family albums. Along with contemporaries Stephen Shore and Joel Meyerowitz, those other great pioneers in color photography and printing processes, Eggleston introduced a lush, gorgeous new dimension to the visual exploration of the American vernacular. 

In William Eggleston: The Democratic Camera, the most comprehensive U.S. retrospective on the photographer to date, which is on view at the Los Angeles Contemporary Museum of Art (LACMA) until 16 January, more than 200 images trace the artist’s work over a 50-year period. What’s apparent in seeing these photographs in one place is the clarity of Eggleston’s worldview. Even now, the images are timeless. You could take a photo from 1975 (say, that untitled image of two women on a couch) and throw it into 2010 and it still looks relevant. Indeed, flipping through a fashion magazine or a film library today only makes us more aware of the debt that so many photographers and filmmakers owe to Eggleston: everything from Juergen Teller’s free-wheeling, enigmatic images for Marc Jacobs (he even photographed Eggleston for the ad campaign) to Sofia Coppola’s quiet yet sumptuously shot films.

The LACMA exhibition also includes early black-and-white prints and Stranded in Canton, a legendary black-and-white ramble of a film shot in Memphis in the 1970s. But it’s the color photos that grab us by the collar and won’t let go. In his pioneering use of color film to document humanity at large, Eggleston brought a compelling new vividness to the human experience. 

Bonnie Tsui lives in San Francisco. She is a frequent contributor to The New York Times and the author of American Chinatown.