A groundbreaking 1976 Museum of Modern Art exhibition of William Eggleston’s work introduced color to the previously black-and-white world of fine-art photography. His subsequent body of work from the mid-1980s, “The Democratic Forest,” appeared less radical, yet depended just as much on the found hues of the world for its impact. At David Zwirner, some 40 untitled images from the series, few of them familiar, picture largely unpeopled places, unassuming everyday spots around Eggleston’s native Memphis and beyond. Utterly ordinary, save for the artist’s casually masterful compositions, these shots boggle the mind with their serendipitous revelations.
In one photo of a diner, tomato-red chairs and tables, accented with squeeze bottles of ketchup, progress in pairs back to windows partially covered by red blinds. Outside, two red newspaper boxes improbably stand next to trash cans with red push doors. The recession of reds rubs up against a steel-blue car a leafy tree, and, in the distance, a lime-green car in a blind alley where a sign reads drive thru window.
Eggleston deploys color like a painter, and the way his chromatic rhymes snap background to foreground like interlocking puzzle pieces recalls Edward Hopper. Like Hopper’s work, Eggleston’s overlooked corners of the country seem run-down, abandoned and unlovely despite their saturated hues. Most vistas end in walls, buildings, fences and curtains, making the locations feel constrained and claustrophobic. Gaudily tinted on the surface, Eggleston’s America holds a lonely alienation at its core.