William Eggleston’s one-man exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1976 is a landmark of photographic history—color photography’s first-ever solo show at the country’s most influential museum. The medium had been maligned as too commercial and too amateurish, but
Eggleston’s understated photographs of Southern life were an instant hit
. Eggleston’s major retrospective
arrived Saturday at Washington’s Corcoran Gallery
after having opened last year at New York’s Whitney Museum. Its title, “Democratic Camera,” calls attention to his populist streak. Eggleston embraced cheap, widely-available materials. His film ”
,” restored last year and available on
and
, documents life among hardscrabble musicians in Memphis and New Orleans as they liquor up and play; it was shot on a
, the first mass-market portable video recorder. And he exposed some of his most iconic photograghs on Kodachrome, the first commercially successful color film.
The Portapak is long gone, and Kodachrome will soon be:
Kodak announced on Monday it is discontinuing
the film, after 74 years on the market. What equipment, then, would a young William Eggleston use today?
The obvious analogy with the Portapak is the inexpensive, feature-stripped line of
. In photography, cell phone cameras might have enticed a young Eggleston with their widespread use. But both suffer from low image quality. Eggleston’s work bucked prejudices against color photography’s lowbrow reputation but his technical skill was still evident—his photographs have great tonal range, color balance, and resolution. The pixilation and poor light handling of the Flip and many cheap digital cameras would seem to make them a long shot for MoMAfication—though digital photographs from more expensive, higher quality cameras have already found wide acceptance in the art world. Has Eggleston’s niche—working in a popular medium that still allowed for virtuosic expression-really vanished, a victim of manufacturers’ bottom lines and the arms race among luxury consumer cameras? Or is there a true digital successor to Kodachrome or Portapak? Post responses in the Fray.
