William Eggleston: 21st Century

William Eggleston's photographs are filled with light; he calibrates its ­differences and qualities. The shadow of a palm tree on a sun-smitten wall; light filtering into an empty shower stall through a faded curtain. Grim, hellish light inside a freezer, the rust-pigmented frost caked to the freezer wall, plastic bags of ice ­snuggled neatly in the lower gloom. Who else would think to photograph this dreary beauty? Eggleston's new exhibition 21st ­Century, selected from work made over the last decade, opens this week at the ­Victoria Miro gallery in London. (The same exhibition also runs concurrently at Cheim and Read in New York, where I saw it a few days ago.) Increasingly the subject of major retrospectives, where individual works are often ­subsumed in the arc of a career that has spanned more than 40 years, the Memphis-born photographer's work is both familiar and strange. This is a small exhibition, and the colour photographs are themselves modest in scale. But what riches they contain, however inconsequential their apparent subjects. Each one is an entry to the world. Many of Eggleston's ­photographs dwell on fragments of ­reality that might otherwise go ­unregarded. One photograph, taken a decade ago somewhere in California, shows a page of windblown newspaper among dry grasses and lumps of ­concrete. Imagine the photographer stumbling over a patch of waste ground, watching where he puts his feet, his attention lost among the weeds and stones. What he finds there is a parched image, a sunbleached page of the LA Times trapped in a tangle of pale shadows. The newspaper presents an image-within-an-image: a couple of girls looking over a bay towards the city of Shanghai, with its far-off skyline of newly built towers. Look hard at the newspaper in ­Eggleston's picture and you can read about an American sports bar in ­Shanghai, where "a pierced-tongued transvestite torch singer croons ­Gershwin songs two nights a week". The bar sounds like Eggleston's kind of place – not that the photographer necessarily noticed the text, and ­perhaps wouldn't care about it if he had. But it is there for us to read. The printed Shanghai sky is a chip of washed-out blue against the ­California dirt. The world writhes up from the ground, full and rich and complex. A knack for noticing What also strikes me about his ­photograph is the composition, its symmetries and balance, its air of ­random fixation. That's the thing about Eggleston's work: he tunes your eyes and makes you notice things – a spoon shining on a Kentucky ­windowsill, a red dumpster against an orange wall in Memphis, a rivulet of water on a dirt road in Mexico (what makes this particular image is a ­flattened plastic bottle on the ground, next to the ­puddle of scummy water). Writing this on a winter morning in New York, I step out for a moment and the orange traffic cones surrounding a patch of snow are suddenly too vivid; a roll of tan carpet dumped on the ­sidewalk looks deliberate and posed, rather than slumped and arbitrary. Passing the same spot a few hours later, in ­different light, the scene looks ­desolate and empty. Colour matters, too. A tearful woman in a black dress crying in a room in Memphis, her face all blotched and red, with green walls behind. On one wall is a poster with the word BLUES printed in orange. How does Eggleston see so much, I find myself asking, and drag such sad riches from the world? The camera sees more than the ­photographer; the eye sees more than the mind can apprehend. The photograph was the work of a moment, a moment that now goes on and on. I think some people photograph things the better to see what they look like. Photographs crop and contain ­reality, but they are as much about ­focus as the things they represent. Look, say Eggleston's photographs, just look. Juergen Teller recently told me that he was with Eggleston ­somewhere, sitting on a bench, and the American photographer just raised his camera and shot a picture of a nearby rubbish bin. Teller, who had pretty much the same camera and was sitting at Eggleston's side, cheekily took a picture of the same subject. ­Eggleston's picture was great, Teller told me, his own picture somehow ­lifeless and ordinary. Some people seem to possess an ­almost uncanny ability to notice things – and not only to notice them, but to ­invest them with meaning and ­complexity. Intuition, attention and openness to the world are part of what makes a photographer great, an ability more certain than luck or happenstance. Whatever it is, ­Eggleston has it. His ­recent work is ­described as having ­become more ­abstract, although all ­images are ­abstractions. When he ­focuses on nothing more than a stretch of vertical louvered curtains, with their pattern of red and brown flecks, a small gape in the middle ­giving on to a further, ­ultramarine ­geometric pattern that catches hidden light, I am transfixed by the stillness and emptiness of a ­moment that amounts to almost nothing. Plaster buttocks and Santa Claus Other images are full of domestic ­clutter, or ordered compositions of ­verticals, horizontals and diagonals. Where another artist – the Canadian Jeff Wall, for example – might contrive an image of a dirty sink and a bar of soap, Eggleston seems to find his ­images with no sense of artifice at all.While his photographs suggest a grounding in a modernist aesthetic, he is never clever or self-consciously artful. He can also be funny (a transfer of Santa Claus stuck to a window seems to float in the sky beyond); macabre (an arm holds up a paper target in a shooting range, the well-grouped ­bullet holes piercing the silhouetted head); and ­formally reserved (rolls of printed ­fabric, depicting a bucolic ­pattern of fox-hunters). A photograph that focuses on the plaster buttocks of a statue seen through a smeary window makes you laugh, even as you are distracted by a plethora of textural detail. A photograph gives you everything all at once, but takes time to unravel. It contains more than what's there in the sheen of the paper, in the ­chemicals and grain of the printed ­surface. ­Eggleston's work makes you want to gaze and gaze again, both at the work itself and the world from which it comes.