Eggleston '77:America in the Rear View Mirror.

"You can take a good picture of anything, a bad one too" - William Eggleston.

That's certainly true - but in the case of Eggleston himself, it has to be said that his pictures err very much on the good side. I'd visited (and written about) his major retrospective at the National Portrait Gallery back in 2016 so his current show at David Zwirner in Mayfair is very much supplementary to that. It's a small show, just seventeen photos - fourteen of which have made the blog - all taken in 1977, all untitled.

...and all really rather wonderful. Some are portraits of people but they're all, in their own way, portraits. Portraits of rusting signage, chairs, and, most of all, cars. All of these things, through inventive camera angles, an inquisitive mind, and, above all, use of light are rendered nearly as human as the humans themselves.

Of course, nostalgia can be a wonderful thing, quite heartbreaking at times, and 1977 is forty-fucking-two years ago now so the fashions (in the model's tank top above, but also in automobile design) now look like the last word in retro cool. We're a long way from the idea, often put forward in the eighties and early nineties, that the seventies was the decade that fashion forgot.

A time when students danced to Abba ironically and wore flares to 'bad taste' parties. Now, the seventies look great. In many ways, and part of this is down to Eggleston not being afraid to embrace colour photography, it looks like the decade that finally embraced the possibilities of colour.

As well as colour, Eggleston has another advantage - America. There's a lot wrong with the country (God, guns, Trump, recent abortion rulings in Alabama that give rapists more say over a woman's body than she has herself) but nobody could deny that the USA is not a fascinating place to look at. The landscapes are amazing enough but man-made America is equally awesome.

Think of Eggleston less of a Diane Arbus or Danny Lyon style gritty realist observer of life and place him closer to great American painters like Georgia o'Keeffe, Edward Hopper, Charles Sheeler, or even Abstract Expressionists like Clyfford Still and Arshile Gorky. There's nothing abstract about Eggleston's work but, even in photographs that look at small detail, there is a monumentality at play. We're looking at something small but we know it's part of something much much bigger.

The gentleman with the ludicrously short tie looks like he's dressed for business. He seems content to be a small cog in a huge machine. I read his somewhat inscrutable expression as one of a man who is as pleased to be standing in a green field on a sunny day as he is to live in a country that rewards hard work and offers freedom. I'd wager that a black man that age in 1970s USA would have witnessed no small amount of racism (institutionalised and otherwise) and, sadly (we know now), if he's still alive he'll be witnessing the rise of the far right again. Seeing America, and its current venal president, at its very worst.

What a shame. The rusted iconic image of a Coke bottle (Andy Warhol said "what's great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. The president drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and you drink Coke too") speaks volumes. You'd be certified insane if you genuinely believed America was a meritocracy now. The Coke's gone flat, the signs rusted, all is elegant chaos. Despair reins down on the ruined kingdom of Ozymandias.

What's great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you can know that the President drinks Coke. Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. Read more at: https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/andy_warhol_597858?src=t_coca-cola
Read more at: https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/andy_warhol_597858?src=t_coca-cola

Wear a stupid MAGA hat if you like. It won't change anything. You're lying to yourself more than you're even lying to others. It'll just make you look like a prick. It'll make you easy to identify for future historians (assuming your moron of a POTUS doesn't blow the whole fucking planet up) when trying to pick apart the reasons a once great country was brought to its knees.

But I digress, it's hard not to when you look at the current shitshow of an administration, and to escape such vile behaviour I look backwards to comforting imagery. William Eggleston, thankfully, documented a lot of it. The shining red chrome of a utility vehicle set against a blue sky, the jumble of signs that resemble a patchwork quilt of an Indian market place far more than they do a giant mall, and even the enormous parking lots you might found outside one of those malls.

The photo of the parking lots shows, even more than others, Eggleston's masteful use of space. The gap between the cars is almost worthy of comparison to the Japanese concept of ma. It might seem crazy to imagine meditative moments and salvation could be found between a Chrysler and an Oldsmobile in a Wal-Mart car park on the outskirts of Phoenix but inspiration comes to us at strange times, in unusual ways. A moment is a moment wherever it happens.

Some of Eggleston's subjects, the human ones, appear lost in those very moments. The vivid saturation of colour that is the trademark of this era of his career does nothing to dehumanise those who appear in his work. In fact, it adds a deeper humanity. You almost feel an empathy with these strangers. They're so present you half imagine starting up a conversation with them.

Eggleston finds life in the gaps of post-war materialism and the fetishisation of consumerism and vehicles. His photos speak both of decline and of pride at the same time. They work in dualities and they refuse to apologise for doing so. The shadow of a chair, a corrugated wall, a makeshift fence, and even strewn litter are all given something of a personality. The photographs are made with a camera but the art is made in Eggleston's eye.

As with that 2016 show at the NPG, Eggleston's work on show at David Zwirner was warm, innovative, and anything but boring. The photos, as you'll see from my final Eggleston quote below, are there to be looked at much more than they are there to be written about. A picture, they say, paints a thousand words. It's taken me about 1,130 to write about a selection of them - and even then I've not even begun to do them justice. Read them anyway.

"Whatever it is about pictures, photographs, it’s just about impossible to follow up with words. They don’t have anything to do with each other". – William Eggelston.