William Eggleston: All That Goes Unnoticed

When William Eggleston’s photographs were shown at New York’s MoMA gallery in 1976, the reaction was mixed. It was ‘the most hated show of the year,’ according to the New York Times. ‘Just plain dull,’ said one review. ‘Perfectly boring,’ wrote another.

Why all the hooha? Well, for one thing, Eggleston’s photographs are, on one level, boring. That is to say, they show boring things. Eggleston’s ‘democratic photography’ was about photographing your environment: a trash can, say, or that pink toilet in the bathroom. The sort of photograph your dad looks at and says, ‘I could've taken that!’ 

But such quotidian subjects had been photographed before. The real reason behind the critical commotion was that Eggleston had shot his work in colour. MoMA had shown colour photographs before, but Eggleston’s show represented a new era. Colour was no longer just for tacky magazine spreads. Now, it was art. And people weren’t happy. 

The exhibition celebrates Eggleston’s work in all its saturated ordinariness

The years since have been kinder. Eggleston’s work has been exhibited in countless retrospectives, the latest being All That Goes Unnoticed, now open at The Photographers’ Gallery. The show gives a broad overview of Eggleston’s career, including a wall of early black-and-white images from when he was still developing his eye. Coming 50 years after that notorious MoMA debut, the exhibition celebrates Eggleston’s work in all its saturated ordinariness: the gas stations, the abandoned tricycles, the roadside restaurants; photographs that helped shape Americana. 

As quotidian as they are, there’s also something otherworldly about Eggleston’s pictures. Partly, this uncanny feeling comes from Eggleston’s preferred dye-transfer process, which saturated the images, making reds appear redder in the print than in real life. But it’s also what he photographed: lonely TV sets; an abandoned Cadillac left to rust; the back of a woman’s head in a diner’s booth, three shining studs pinned in her sculpted bouffant like Orion’s Belt or a surgeon’s scar. It’s no surprise David Lynch loved Eggleston. 

Politics is largely absent from Eggleston’s work. The South’s racial divide occasionally crops up, but for the most part, you wouldn’t know there was any kind of political struggle in 1960s Memphis. Eggleston was born into a wealthy, white Southern family. He was privileged. He could afford to ignore police brutality and photograph trash cans instead.

But look closer and darker details in the pictures emerge: an elegantly-dressed woman poses in suburban Memphis. She stares directly into the lens, rare in Eggleston’s pictures, but next to her sits a bundle of chains and a padlock, lending this otherwise ordinary portrait an air of menace and confinement. Or take his most famous work, of a light bulb hanging from a red ceiling. The colour is so overpowering, the image so striking, that it takes you a minute to notice the poster in the bottom right of the frame, showing various sex positions. 

Eggleston wasn’t the first to photograph the ordinary, but he certainly popularised it. The ‘Instagram aesthetic’ is almost synonymous with him: snaps of aeroplane windows, flowers on a suburban street, endless photographs of vintage cars. 

We don’t learn an awful lot about Eggleston from The Photographers’ Gallery. We don’t learn that he was raised in a large house on a former cotton plantation, nor do we learn anything about his private life. The show does not psychoanalyse or overly contextualise the work. Rather, All That Goes Unnoticed presents Eggleston simply and unpretentiously. His work is banal, and extraordinary.