Photographer William Eggleston's Southern Gothic is steamier than a heatwave — review.

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Distinctive: Eggleston’s work, such as Untitled 1974, above, has a strong cinematic feel.

 Mark Hudson is impressed by the exquisitely sinister edge of William Eggleston's retrospective at the National Portrait Gallery.  

The celebrated Tennessee snapper William Eggleston is the epitome of Southern Gothic. There’s a muggy, decadent quality to his images of beleaguered diners, gas stations and un-air-conditioned bedrooms, redolent of remote redneck communities and fly-blown Deep South mansions.

Born in 1939, Eggleston championed colour from the mid-Sixties, a time when most art photographers would only shoot in black and white. His distinctive palette of intense reds and washed-out greens makes these images feel not so much heated as positively sticky to the touch.

Girl with Red Hair, 2001 Credit: Centre for Photography ©Eggleston Artistic Trust;

But does Eggleston really qualify as a portraitist? His images are far from devoid of people, but it’s the locations that stick in the mind – and the classic cars. In Untitled, 1965-8, a couple sit in a McDonald’s car park in what looks like a red Chevrolet. She sucks on a milkshake, he eats fries; their faces are largely obscured by mirrors and darkened windscreen. In another picture from the same series, a woman with an enormous, elaborate beehive hairdo sits with her back to us on a gleaming green banquette, talking to a man visible only via his smoking cigarette. The effect is exquisitely sinister – you can see why filmmaker David Lynch counts Eggleston as a prime influence.

Untitled, 1973-4 by William Eggleston Credit: Centre for Photography ©Eggleston Artistic Trust;

These are quintessential Eggleston images – but this fascinating exhibition contains much that is far from quintessentially his. Indeed, even fans would struggle to reconcile many of the exhibits with what they think of as his distinctive style.
Born into a wealthy Memphis family, Eggleston grew up in intimate proximity to the former slave-owning Southern culture, but felt indifferent to it until his mentor, the New York painter Tom Young – seen in an image here sprawled out on a bed – advised him to look at everything with equal intensity, no matter how he felt about it.

Untitled, c1975 (Marcia Hare in Memphis Tennessee) by William Eggleston Credit: ©Eggleston Artistic Trust

Early black-and-white images, taken between 1960 and 1965, show him rising to that challenge. A hard-faced elderly woman in a loud houndstooth coat looks frostily back at us from beside a child’s elephant ride, while the defensive expression of a young black waiter speaks volumes about race relations in the Deep South. Uninterested in the traditional male Southern pursuits – sport and hunting – Eggleston gravitated naturally to Memphis’s music industry, documenting its clubs and studios in endless hours of monochrome video footage – some blurry clips of which are shown here – and large portraits of Memphis nightclub-goers. While technically excellent, these images lack the distinctive graininess of Eggleston’s classic images, and aren’t particularly illuminating about the subjects or the setting.

Untitled, 1960s by William Eggleston, 1960s  Credit: ©Eggleston Artistic Trust

The Eggleston “look” stems, we are told, from his mastery of the dye transfer photographic process – a close cousin of Technicolor that he stumbled upon in the Seventies, which gives his images their strongly cinematic feel. A picture of a middle-aged man, seated on the bed of a stark, clean but indefinably seedy hotel bedroom feels like the last word in alienation, while an image of a well-dressed black woman walking towards us, as a white man with his jacket round his elbows moves away, has extraordinary suggestive power.

Untitled, 1970 - 4 (Dennis Hopper) by William Eggleston, 1970–74  Credit: ©Eggleston Artistic Trust

Eggleston’s image of film star and director Dennis Hopper driving across the desert is so filmic it could pass for a still from Easy Rider, though as we can’t see his face, it’s not much of a portrait. Among the other well-known figures, we see Joe Strummer of the Clash and the Southern novelist Eudora Welty, but there’s little sense of the exploration of personality you associate with a real portrait.

Untitled, 1969 - 70 (the artist's uncle, Ayden Schuyler Senior, with Jasper Staples, in Cassidy Bayou, Summer, Mississippi) by William Eggleston  Credit: ©Eggleston Artistic Trust

The people Eggleston is compulsively interested in are the members of his own family, notably two very large – 5ft-wide – images of elderly relatives. In the most memorable, his uncle Ayden Schuyler Senior, stands among a mass of dead leaves, in an uncharacteristically wintery image, with his black assistant and driver, Jasper Staples, a few feet behind. The postures and expressions of the two men, each of whom understands his position in an immemorial hierarchy, carry a whole movie’s worth of emotion.
Eggleston is essentially a storyteller, and the best images in this show aren’t so much portraits as passages in a lifetime’s narrative about a people, a culture and a place.

Untitled, c.1980 (Joe Strummer) by William Eggleston, [c.1980]  Credit: ©Eggleston Artistic Trust

William Eggleston Portraits is at the National Portrait Gallery, London, until Oct 23. Tickets: 020 7321 6600; npg.org.uk
 
The following images show French cities, towns and attractions during the 1890s - and in colour. They were created using the Photochrom technique pioneered by Photoglob Zürich AG, which sees colour manually added to black-and-white negatives. The Swiss firm licensed the process to others, such as the Detroit Photographic Company in the US and the Photochrom Company of London. The following images are among the most striking produced during the period...

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