In the fall of 1976, the photographer William Eggleston (b. 1939) received an assignment from Rolling Stone to photograph the region around Plains, Georgia, the home of presidential candidate Jimmy Carter. The gig arrived at a promising moment for Eggleston. That year the Museum of Modern Art mounted a solo show of his work, which many saw as a provocation. At the time, Eggleston’s preferred medium — color film — had little esteem among the art-world cognoscenti. Serious portraiture was supposed to look like Robert Frank’s The Americans: gripping but inscrutable faces, hard angles, stark black and white.
Critics eagerly pounced on Eggleston — the New York Times called the MOMA show “perfectly banal” and “perfectly boring.” But he rightly became a major artist all the same, in part because his images’ snapshot-like simplicity belied something more complex and discomfiting. One of his most famous photographs, 1973’s Red Ceiling, exemplifies the sensibility. It’s a shot of a ceiling and walls in a room painted a queasy blood-red; white cords running to a central light bulb gave the shot a geometric order, yet the framing still feels off-kilter; cropped posters of Kama Sutra positions suggest something lurid was going on. But we weren’t going to be privy to it, and Eggleston wasn’t going to explore it too deeply himself. Famous for never trying to take the same picture twice, he developed an aesthetic that highlighted inexplicability, feel.
There’s nothing overtly uncomfortable in the Carter-country photos Eggleston shot for Election Eve, first published in 1977 in an edition of just five copies, released widely in 2017, and now in a new edition on our own election eve. (Rolling Stone never ran the photos.) But give it time. The most obviously anomalous thing you notice is that only two of the 100 plates feature visible human beings, which gives a foreboding atmosphere to photographs that might otherwise seem pastoral. Traveling through Mississippi and Georgia, Eggleston found plenty of grassy rises and empty fields. The days are typically sunny, the sky an inviting pale blue. But the lack of people is matched with abundant evidence of humanity. Chimney stacks and wood-and-wire fences are overrun by weeds. A shirt hangs limply outside the front door of a shack. Metal ads for Coke and Nehi are rusted through. Trash accumulates in ditches. People do live here, the photos say. Or did. The world feels post-human, raptured.
It’s an odd approach for a set of photos meant to commemorate a collective human activity — throughout, Eggleston seems to be lightly satirizing the kind of photos he ought to be taking. He’s captured an “authentic” America, yet cannily undermines any nobility the word contains. In Plains, he finds a multicolored set of ballfield bleachers, but the colors are faded — too clean to be dilapidated, yet too old and cheap to qualify as well-preserved. A tree in front of a high school has the cryptic words “BIG E” painted on it in white — a message meaningful to somebody, but to whom? It evokes the word “croatoan,” carved on a tree by the mysteriously vanished Roanoke colony. The sole overt nod to politics, a car in a parking lot bearing a “Jimmy Carter for President” bumper sticker, relegates the decal to the far lower right of the photo’s field, ceding most of the frame to the pale blue sky, the gray asphalt of the lot, and the dull brown wall of a building. If this were a W.J.T. Turner seascape, the sticker would be the unlucky sailor in the far corner anonymously cast overboard and sinking into the ocean.
The two photos that most obviously feature human beings clarify Eggleston’s goals for his project. In one, taken in Mississippi, a man occupies the center of the shot, walking with his back to the camera in the middle distance. He’s crossing a street, headed to a gas station where a car is parked with its hood raised. Telephone and power lines hang above him, as does faded bunting from another gas station in the near distance. It’s not a pastoral image, but nor could you call it ruin porn — Eggleston has captured a determinedly liminal space, one that could be on the path to collapse or improvement. The bunting is up, but unlikely to be replaced; cars are around but they’re in the shop.
The second photo with a person is similarly muted. A man sits on a John Deere loader, crossing a street at a peanut processing plant in Plains. Again, the figure is at the center of the image; a shadow covers half the pale gray shed he’s presumably leaving, framed by the gray of the road and green of the cut grass on the other side of the street. Its geometric forms and play of light and shadow make the image as pretty as a Hopper painting. But here, too, the mood is uncertain. Is this place thriving or stalled? The man is too far away to see. He could be driving off. He could be stuck.
What hovers over both photos isn’t pessimism or optimism but ambivalence. That’s usually a weak emotion in an artist. We want our artists to be risk-takers, messengers, decisive. It’s certainly what you want from a photographer to cover a news story, like an upcoming election — clear images that encapsulate the stakes of a pivotal moment. But in his Plains photos you can feel Eggleston determinedly seeking out ways to get out from under the cliches that define photojournalism (irony, high emotion), or landscape photography (overt prettiness, wide-angle shots), and the South (dilapidation, sloth). Instead of magnolias, he’s swapped in weeds; instead of ruined shacks, old but still-standing churches and jails; instead of people, a sense that this is a place that could take humanity or leave it. His tone is impassive, with the gentlest of smirks. Why apply more meaning to this place than it deserves? He approaches even death with a flat affect. In Friendship, Georgia, he visits a cemetery and takes a worm’s-eye-view shot of an undecorated headstone bearing the dullest name in the book: Smith.
In his preface to Election Eve, Lloyd Fonvielle writes that Eggleston’s Plains photos represent an “elegy … a statement of perfect calm.” (Ellipses his.) But the statement is contradictory. An elegy is something written for the recently dead; it’s a response to disruption. Elegists might seek calm, but they’re not in possession of it. Eggleston doesn’t aspire to calm. His images are often gorgeous, but strangely so — he has a knack for decoupling gas pumps and mailboxes and house porches from their status as symbols and making them into simply attractive objects in themselves. He does so partly by playing with perspective and distance — he looks at them a tick too far away than we’re used to, or from too low to the ground. He makes things strange so we can see things new. But that also means he’s erased the symbolic language we reflexively attach to such images, baffling our instinct to hang “South” or “rural” or “election” upon them. His job — his risk — was to scrub the meaning from the world so completely that making sense of it, bringing order to it, choosing its direction, is a task that’s left to the viewer. In an election, that job was always ours anyway.
[Published by Steidl on September 2020, 212 pages, 100 images, $80 hardcover. You may acquire this book by clicking here.]
All images are © 2017 Eggleston Artistic Trust and appear here with the permission of Steidl.
Image 1 / “Sumter”
Image 2 / “Mississippi”
Image 3 / “Bank Parking Lot, Plains”