When you say art photography, most people think of their favorite black and white pictures such as ones taken by Henri Cartier-Bresson or maybe Ansel Adams. But, this month an exhibition of work by William Eggleston at the Fondation Cartier pour l’art Contemporain proves there is more to it than shades of gray.
Eggleston is one of the pioneers of color art photography. He — along with others such as Steven Shore and Joel Meyerowitz — dared to break away from black and white. He is to color what Lee Friedlander and Garry Winogrand were to that tradition. All three revolutionized “how we think of pictures” and changed the way photographers approached their medium.
Although William Eggleston put color photography on the map with his one-man show at the Museum of Modern art in New York (1976) there have been few opportunities to see his work in Europe due to a slower acceptance of color here. The overview at Cartier’s presents approximately 150 images including some of his vintage dye-transfer prints that shocked the art world back in the ’70s because of their chromatic intensity and apparently “snapshot” æsthetic.
Eggleston broke with conventional compositional standards, showing details, as well as partial views of objects and people on the outer edges. His images disorient the viewer, creating a degree of ambiguity. “I like the idea of making a picture that doesn’t look like a human picture. Humans make pictures which tend to be about five feet above the ground, looking horizontally...,” explains Eggleston.
His subjectively controlled colors and exaggerated perspectives turn mundane subjects into visual metaphors for an alienated world. The interplay of color, form and content in his photographs gives normal things or situations an additional level of meaning that sometimes seems ominous.
Eggleston’s pictures deal with the stuff of daily life. With no guiding titles, dates or place names, the viewer is asked to simply contemplate what is there... to look more closely and ponder the meaning of things.
To Feb 24, Tue-Sun, noon to 8pm, Fondation Cartier, 261 bd Raspail, 14e, M° Raspail, tel: 01 42 18 56 50, 30F/20F
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