Personal Exposure, paper

Personal Exposure

This paper will look into the visions of William Eggleston and Alec Soth, contemporary artists who have a vast age and cultural span. Both of these photographers’  visions of personal exposure open the world of self-expressive narrative.  The terms “self expression” or “personal exposure” can be applicable to many genres in the photographic world. It does not matter whether photographers specialize in abstract, nature, portraiture, or documentary work; each personal expression is a form of self exploration. William Eggleston (born 1939) first became known in a one-man show at the Museum of Modern Art in 1976 called William Eggelston, with an accompanying book titled William Eggelston Guide by MoMA, written and curated by John Szarkowski. The seventy-five dye transfer color photographs depict Eggelston’s life in Memphis, Tennessee.  The photos resemble snapshots or a visual diary of non-descriptive scenes, such as the inside of a freezer, a typical southern living room, a view under a bed, or a red ceiling with a light bulb.  These images of private daily workings of friends, family, and surrounding neighborhoods are rich in personal symbolism. The photos are, as John Szarkowski states, “a diary, where the important meanings would not be public and general but private and esoteric". (10) Although Eggelston’s 1976 exhibition at the MoMA received mixed reviews, Hilton

Kramer, then chief art critic of the New York Times, described the photographs as “perfectly banal, perfectly boring” (Korine). The same paper declared the exhibition “the most hated show of the year” (Korine) Eggelston remarked that the critics’ viewpoints were as simple as his photos:  “I wasn’t particularly concerned” (Korine).  Ten years later Eggleston delved deeper into the image of the south and the meaning of his heritage within the southern literary tradition in his book, The Democratic Forest. “These pictures are fascinating partly because they contradict our expectations. We have been told so often of the bland, synthetic smoothness of exemplary American life”. (Szarkowski 13)  The photographs are mostly devoid of people, yet their presence is vivid in every image–a neon sign of a confederate flag, an empty couch outside, a hatchet next to a barbecue stove.  Eggelston’s vision became the forefront mode of personal expression with a camera in color photography.  Even though he pushed color on his audience, his large dye transfer color photos are not about the color but about the expressiveness and existence of the subject and the photographer’s environs. 

Over the next forty years of making photographs with a small 35mm Leica camera and medium format, Eggelston’s photographs deal with subjects that are things generally noticed but passed over. His use of supplementary color and framing defines a certain tension in his subjects.  This personal exposure of divulging one’s surroundings encompasses the idea of self-discovery or one’s identity, in that it unfolds the workings or vision of the artist’s life. John Szarkowski further builds on this idea: “To me it seems that the pictures reproduced here are about the photographer's home, about his place, in both important meanings of that word. One might say about his identity” (6)

Another photographer who follows in the idea of personal exposure is Alec Soth (born 1969) who works with an 8x10 large format camera, following in the tradition of documentary photography.  With calculated thought, Soth produces color photographs with an exacting order that results in an air of harmonious ease.  Soth’s careful charge of his pictorial elements in no way reduces or commands the beauty of his subjects; on the contrary, it permits their declaration. As in his book, Sleeping by the Mississippi, which follows the river’s path with twists and turns that keep the viewer’s attention focused on scenes of decay, loneliness, lust, and incredible details of pure human nature. The photos interplay off each other by means of revealing the character of the subject quietly on one page, and the next page allows the subject to be engulfed by the scene.  In many of Soth’s images, the characters he photographs are dreamers whose regal poses define their  personalities.   This technique incorporates a combination of accident and order by encompassing the spaces between the subject and the scene without rhetoric.  In his next book, Niagara, which is a photo record of lost and found love in upstate New York’s honeymoon spot, Soth once again explores the relationships of individuals and scenes that unfold to offer a happy and sometimes sad and lonely document of love.   Both Soth and Eggleston’s subjects are of evocative simplicity of others’ lives, and the surroundings of marginal living, usually off beat and banal. Whereas Soth’s images are of one place defined by a story line, both photographers’ visions are emotionally charged with lyrical suggestiveness.  

In looking at both of these photographers’ works, I realized that my work prior to the MFA program was a more defined vision of my world in Wellfleet,  a place where summers are filled with tourists and the winters long, empty, and hard (though I find summer lonelier).  I leave the Cape to go to cities to do my street photography so as to elude the pressure of loneliness.  I have read the opening to Eggelston’s guide numerous times, but these words struck an accord with me: “This new tradition has revised our sense of what in the world is meaningful and our understanding of how the meaningful can be described”. (Szarkowski 8) 

I am seeking more of my personal quest in my work.  Though I will continue the street photography, my aim is to broaden my vision to somehow tie city and rural locations together. It will be a challenge.  I will end with one more quote by John Szarkowski from 1976: 

 “The world now contains more photographs than bricks, and they are, astonishingly, all different. Even the most servile of photographers has not yet managed to duplicate exactly an earlier work by a great and revered master”. (Szarkowsk 5)

Works Cited

Eggleston, William. The Hasselblad Award 1998.  Göteborg, Sweden: Hasselblad Center,   

1999. Print.

---.  The Democratic Forest. Afterward, By Eggleston. London: Secker & Warburg, 1989.       

Print

Grant, Richard. “Roving Eye.” Telegraph,  29 June 2002. 

Hagan, Charles “An Interview with William Eggelston.”  Aperture, Summer 1989. Print

Holborn, Mark. Foreword. Ancient and Modern. By William Eggleston. New York: Random House, 1992. Print

Korine, Harmony“Interview.” Leica World (2002). Print

Sampson, Tim. “Profile.” Memphis Magazine,  Mar. 1994.

Szarkowski, John. Foreword. William Eggleston’s Guide. By William Eggleston. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1976. Print