Local Color.(William Eggleston)(Biography)

You can always tell a William Eggleston photograph. It's the one in color that hits you in the face and leaves you confused and happy, and perhaps convinces you that you don't understand photography nearly as well as you thought you did. To view "William Eggleston: Democratic Camera, Photographs and Video, 1961-2008," at the Whitney, is to be pummelled by eccentric beauty, and to wonder about it. A pertinaciously slumming aristocrat from Memphis, Tennessee, and points south, Eggleston, now sixty-nine years old, is one of the great Romantic originals of camerawork, with Robert Frank, Diane Arbus, Stephen Shore, and Nan Goldin. Like them, he goes beyond helping us to notice certain wrinkles of reality. His eye for epiphanies in the everyday raises suspicions that, without his aid, we miss more than we see of what falls within our gaze. The effect involves techniques that seem hardly fair in straight photography--chiefly dye-transfer printing, an arduous and expensive process (mooted, of late, by digital technology) which employs screens of magenta, cyan blue, and yellow to manipulate color. But there's no gainsaying Eggleston's results. He shoots like a shutterbug and executes like a painter. Synthetic gorgeousness iconizes pictures that flaunt the nonchalance of snapshots. His art attained full power in one of his first dye-transfers, printed in the early nineteen-seventies from a transparency made in the sixties: a supermarket lad awkwardly collecting shopping carts in late-afternoon sun that sets his reddish ducktail-combed hair and adolescent flesh uncannily aglow. The subject is a dreary fact. The content is erotic truth that Plato would have endorsed.

Eggleston was born rich, in Memphis, in 1939, the maternal grandson of a prominent judge and a plantation heiress from Sumner, Mississippi. They raised him, in Sumner, almost from birth until the age of eleven, while his father served in the Navy and his mother lived mainly at a naval base in Florida. Afflicted with asthma, Eggleston grew up largely indoors, playing piano, drawing, and tinkering with sound equipment. Given a Brownie camera at the age of ten, he took pictures of his dog. The results disappointed him, and he had no further truck with the medium until 1957, when, briefly a student at Vanderbilt University, he bought a camera and a developer at the urging of a painter friend. Two years later, at the University of Mississippi (he never graduated from any college; he refused to take tests), he was profoundly affected by two classic books of modern photography: Henri Cartier-Bresson's "The Decisive Moment" (1952) and Walker Evans's "American Photographs" (1938).

Eggleston and Rosa Kate Dosset, a daughter of plantation owners and a friend since childhood, had been conspicuous in Sumner for their matching baby-blue Cadillacs. They married in 1964, and had three children. Eggleston is a gregarious, much-travelled, hard-living dandy, proud never to have owned a pair of jeans. An installation in the show, "Stranded in Canton" (circa 1973-74), screens excerpts from thirty hours of black-and-white videotape, some of which he shot using an infrared camera in dim light. The subject amounts to a louche, peripatetic Southern spawn of Andy Warhol's dissipated Factory scene of the mid-sixties. Acquaintances of the photographer, drunk and/or drugged more often than not, hilariously rant, casually empty a pistol into a ceiling, bite the heads off live chickens (see it, believe it), and otherwise parade lives of unquiet desperation. Occasionally, the Delta blues singer Walter (Furry) Lewis brings the proceedings to order with an impromptu, haunting performance. I find it rewarding to think of Eggleston as a blues photographer. The extraordinary aesthetic discipline of his photographs shimmers with subliminal knowledge of the hell-bent--although, in a Southern vein, sardonically mannered--chaos that erupts in "Canton." At the video's end, a memorial sequence ticks off the untimely demise of many of the participants.

Eggleston belongs to a generation of Americans who elevated photography to the rank of a major art. In 1967, he met and impressed John Szarkowski, the photography curator of the ...