William Eggleston @ Krowswork

Posted on 14 May 2010.

As a color
photographe
r, William
Eggleston’s
contribution
s are
esteemed.
His 1976
show at the
MOMA in
New York
was decisive
in the
establishmen
t of color
photography
as a fine art
form. Peter
Schjeldahl,
writing
in The New
Yorker,
named him "one of the great Romantic originals of camerawork, with Robert Frank, Diane Arbus, Stephen Shore and
Nan Goldin."
Stranded in Canton (1973-75), his sole video effort, was culled to 77 minutes from of 30 hours of black and white
footage shot in and around his home city of Memphis, Tennessee. Eggleston recorded it with a Sony Portapak, a device
whose benefits — low cost, ease of use and instant playback — enabled video art. Using it to delve into recesses that
he previously only explored with a still camera, Eggleston shot a kind of a manic home movie with his social life as the
setting.
Some of his friends ignore the camera entirely; in one household scene, a standing man speaks to his guests or relatives
who are seated around a living room in armchairs. He punctuates his story with an abrupt "shut up!" every time
someone else tries to speak, which grows more and more frequent as the Tennessee Williams-like scene progresses.
Everyone seems oblivious to the camera; that is, until you hear someone off-screen carp "put that machine down!" That
sentiment echoes in a later bar scene, where one man calls Eggleston a "posing asshole" and another comments, "I
think what you’re going to find out is that not everyone wants to be filmed." A woman illustrates this point with her
middle finger. Others are quite willing to mug for the camera. They mimic documentary narrators describing artworks,
newscasters, actors in a hot romance, perpetrators in a crime drama and nightclub singers.
Stranded in Canton requires a strong stomach—and not only because of the acts of "geeking" recorded: I learned here
that geeking means more than biting the head off of a live chicken—it also involves holding up the body like a
wineskin and sucking blood from the remaining neck stump. If you happen to be prone to motion sickness, like me,
nausea may beset you just from the lurching to and fro of the hand-held camera. Some of these experiments, though,
yield sophisticated forms of camera play that did not get integrated into the general cinematic vocabulary until much
later. In a gas station scene, for example, the camera revolves in a rapid circle around a man who follows it with his
eyes and remains the target of the lens as the background scenery whirls. Such effects, though they were long ago
perfected by
such
directors as
Orson
Welles and
Max Ophuls,
still exert a
dizzying
effect.
They
certainly fit
the
circumstanc
es, which,
for the most
part, are
thoroughly
alcohol-
drenched,
though it
takes a while
for this to
fully
register. In the early scenes, Eggleston throws us off balance with images of his children. His daughter provides dreamy
and ethereal looks, while his son seems utterly transparent, exposing raw fascination through wide eyes and unguarded
expressions. After that, the bleary and outrageous behavior of the adults takes over, signaled by the appearance of a
whiskey bottle and party scenes.
All the while, Eggleston, with his Portapak, seems to be making notes of things he doesn’t want you to miss. In his
extreme close-ups he moves all the way in — into people’s eyes and even into their mouths. The close-up of "Lady
Russell" reveals his eye makeup; blues musician Walter "Furry" Lewis’s missing front teeth are the target of another
zoom. This is not the side of Eggleston we are familiar with. His photographs may direct us to tender details, but his
experiments with the Portapak magnify them.

Still, despite the close-ups, the film fills me with a sense of distance. As a Gen-X Californian, I am distant from the
South, where my parents and grandparents grew up, and distant from the ‘70s, which I barely remember. Black and
white film seems to push the action even further away; I am constantly aware of looking into another time and place.
Yet the distance contrasts with the spontaneous quality and the informal, personal settings of the video which seem to
invite you into their very real, private lives. The kids in the opening sequences certainly show an excruciating
transparency.
Still, moving
pictures can
lie just as
effectively
as a static
photograph.
John
Szarkowski,
the curator
of
Eggleston’s
1976
MOMA
show, noted
that Canton,
despite
its cinéma
véritéleaning
s, doesn’t
necessarily
provide
access to the
lives it purports to represent. And it’s precisely that tension — between openness and distance – that gives this video
its essential frisson.
After I watch it, gallery director Jasmine Moorhead shows me Eggleston’s chromogenic prints. The contrast is
vast. Where the stills are visually quiet, the video is verbose and raucous, and where the photographs are mostly
devoid of people, the video explodes with them. If there are any quiet moments in Canton, they seem to center on a
particular young woman who gazes at the camera with a calm, knowing look.
–LIESA LIETZKE
William Eggleston, Stranded in Canton @ Krowswork through May 23. (The show, Closer than they Appear, also
includes work by Sade Huron and Ryan Smith.)