Sunday, July 21, 2013

William Eggleston - At War With The Obvious, at The Met, NYC


William Eggleston - Untitled, Sumner, Mississippi, 1971
Running currently at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC, and finishing July 28 is a retrospective of William Eggleston's classic 70's color work, all dye-transfer prints. The title of the show - At War With The Obvious - was taken from a comment Eggleston made in a conversation he had with one Mark Holborn over breakfast in Greenwoood Mississippi, February 1988. The text of the conversation was published in Eggleston's 1989 bookwork The Democratic Forest.

William Eggleston (American, born 1939) emerged in the early 1960s as a pioneer of modern color photography. Now, fifty years later, he is its most prolific and influential exemplar. Through a profound appreciation of the American vernacular (especially near his home in the Mississippi Delta) and confidence in the dye transfer printmaking process to reveal the region's characteristic qualities of light and saturated chromatics, Eggleston almost single-handedly validated color photography as a legitimate artistic medium. This exhibition celebrates the artist's iconic photographs of commonplace subjects that have become touchstones for generations of artists, musicians, and filmmakers from Nan Goldin to David Byrne, the Coen Brothers, and David Lynch.

Willim Eggleston - Untitled, 1974

William Eggleston - Untitled, 1974
William Eggleston - Untitled, 1974

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