William Eggleston: More Southern, More Weird

At The Photographers’ Gallery, new show All That Goes Unnoticed mixes the Memphis-born maverick’s colour-saturated works with earlier, lesser-known monochromes

In 1967, William Eggleston arrived in Manhattan with a suitcase full of colour slides of the Mississippi Delta. From gas stations to cigarette-smoking housewives, these saturated images of rural America held an uncanny isolation. They caught the eye of John Szarkowski – then a curator at MoMA and America’s most influential photography critic – who convinced the museum to acquire a print and later give the photographer his first solo show, in 1976.

At the time, ‘artistic’ photography meant black and white, a conscious separation from the colours of advertising. Photographers like Garry Winogrand and Lee Friedlander used the monochrome aesthetic to capture an America of kinetic spontaneity; playful, socially informed and inevitably centred on New York – the city where money, art and idealism were eager bedfellows. Eggleston was different; his work was less frenetic, less immaculate, more Southern, more weird. And he found the richness of colour he sought in the Kodak dye printing process used in advertising. Critics who had previously hailed the idea of prioritising everyday real-life experience in photography – ‘vernacular perspective‘ – decided Eggleston had gone too far; didn’t these images just look like overexposed holiday snaps? Szarkowski was attacked for describing them as “perfect” – “perfectly banal” was the New York Times’ response.

Yet in those off-kilter shots, Szarkowski recognised a radical new perspective. Unlike the previous generation, who treated colour, if they used it at all, as just another tool in their toolbox, Eggleston considered colour to be inherent to the photograph. For him, Szarkowski explained, “the blue and the sky were one thing”. Moreover, living in the artistic backwater of Mississippi had fostered in Eggleston the belief that the everyday could be just as profound – if not more so – than the extraordinary. When a friend suggested he photograph “boring” things, the idea became the foundation of his ‘democratic process’; he was determined to photograph anything and everything.

The new exhibition at the Photographer’s Gallery, All That Goes Unnoticed, underscores Eggleston’s ability to capture the collision of the American dream with reality – his explosively colourful photographs reveal on closer inspection a darkly cynical sensibility. He was the first to pin-point a certain strain of weirdness that permeates American society and remains its most perceptive chronicler.

He once defined himself as someone “at war with the obvious”. Take his close-up photograph of a tricycle (Untitled, Memphis, 1969), which becomes a Trojan horse or a giant insect-like invader threatening the suburban bungalows of Tennessee. That strangeness permeated Eggleston’s character too. He seemed to embody what outsiders found confusing in America. He was at the forefront of a revolutionary way of seeing the world, but he dressed like an executive – albeit one with a frontiersman’s love of guns. Often, he would imagine he was a dragonfly, or that his camera was a rifle to be aimed; anything to get away from the standard human viewpoint. In interviews, he can be taciturn, believing that talking about his work diminishes it – once asked why he shot in colour he replied: “as far as I see it the world’s in colour and there’s nothing we can do about it”.

Egglesonian is not a catchy eponym, but looking at the works in All That Goes Unnoticed, the photographer’s influence on the popular imagination feels arguably deeper than his contemporary, Andy Warhol. His work laid the foundation for so many other photographers, but also musicians and filmmakers, most demonstrably in the unsettling hyper-reality and paranormal of David Lynch: think of the blood-soaked reds and sapphire hues of Blue Velvet, a dead ringer for the photograph Red Ceiling, which, incidentally, has its own Lynchian quality – it was shot in the home of Eggleston’s best friend shortly before he was murdered during a break-in.

Lynch also takes something more fundamental from Eggleston: that sense of the artificial or the superficial that upsets America’s conception of itself as God’s own country. The musician David Byrne has written about this sense: “Maybe the thrill of getting thrown for a loop is what I was seeking. Like stepping off a roller coaster, or spinning around until dizzy, or drugs or driving music. I guess the feeling of slight disorientation is addictive.” Talking Heads’ first, anxiety-ridden album More Songs About Buildings and Food is peak Eggleston in concept, describing the confusion and inauthenticity of suburban America and elevating, in the bluntest of ways, the ordinary to the status of art. That perceived ordinariness is all over Tina Barney’s photographs too – her semi-spontaneous tableaux depicting the WASP elite rely on the conception that everyday ritual is surreal and worth recording; modern-day life as theatre.

All That Goes Unnoticed aims to interrogate the emergence of Eggleston’s weird view of American life by presenting not only his best-known work, but also his earlier monochrome prints. These Cartier-Bresson inspired works always feel a little like watching the first half of the Wizard of Oz and waiting expectantly for the film to bleed into colour. Colour, after all, is Eggleston’s not-so-secret weapon. By exaggerating it, his work is at once a fantasy and facsimile of the day-to-day experiences of tens of millions of Americans. In large part, we owe him our appreciation for both the beauty and the unsettling quality of the ordinary. Without him we wouldn’t have that gothic strain of cockeyed normality that can both upset and transfix us. Eggleston’s talent is for seeing both sides of the American dream – the Wizard and the con man behind.

William Eggleston: All That Goes Unnoticed is on at The Photographer’s Gallery until 21 February 2027