LOT Phillips de Pury & Company  /  PHOTOGRAPHS PART I  / 

41

WILLIAM EGGLESTON (American, b. 1939) JACKSON, MISSISSIPPI signed and editioned on verso dye-tra...

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WILLIAM EGGLESTON (American, b. 1939) JACKSON, MISSISSIPPI signed and editioned on verso dye-tra...
WILLIAM EGGLESTON (American, b. 1939) JACKSON, MISSISSIPPI signed and editioned on verso dye-transfer print 20 3/4 x 13 5/8 in. (52.7 x 34.6 cm) paper: 24 x 20 in. (61 x 50.8 cm) 1970-1971 printed 1986 this print is number 5 from an edition of 6 PROVENANCE Private Collection, LOS ANGELES LITERATURE John Szarkowski, WILLIAM EGGLESTON'S GUIDE, New York, 1976, p. 63 (illustrated) HASSELBLAD AWARD 1998: WILLIAM EGGLESTON, Gothenburg, 1999, n.p. (illustrated) Constance W. Green, ed., DOUBLE VISION: PHOTOGRAPHS FROM THE STRAUSS COLLECTION, Long Beach, California, 2000, cat. no. 29 (illustrated) Hervé Chandès, WILLIAM EGGLESTON, Paris, 2001, pl. 116 (illustrated) In May 1976, William Eggleston's COLOR PHOTOGRAPHS opened at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. A watershed event, the exhibition signaled the validation of color photography by one of the premier cultural institutions in the world. Lots 41 and 43 were both selected for this show, and demonstrate Eggleston's inimitable mastery of the medium. In typical fashion, Eggleston has focused on banal scenes of day-to-day life in his native Memphis and northern Mississippi. In one picture, a young man sits in the back seat of a car. In the other, a ramshackle pickup truck is parked in a driveway. Eggleston activates these potentially bland, vernacular subjects with his unerring eye for dramatic chromatic incident. JACKSON, MISSISSIPPI is dominated by a more limited palette of black and white, witnessed in the car's upholstery, the man's striped pants, and the license plate at his side. Within this context, the man's pale pink shirt surprises the eye with an unexpected vibrancy. In MEMPHIS, by contrast, the metallic blue body of the truck is surrounded by spring greens and perceived through a screen of lavender wisteria. By mingling these natural and artificial colors, Eggleston transforms the everyday into the otherworldly. The chromatic power of these images, which is only enhanced through dye-transfer printing, has been eloquently described by John Szarkowski. "Reduced to monochrome, Eggleston's designs would be in fact almost static, almost as blandly resolved as the patterns seen in kaleidoscopes, but they are perceived in color, where the wedge of a purple necktie, or the red disk of a stoplight against the sky, has a different compositional torque than its equivalent panchromatic gray, as well as a different meaning. For Eggleston, who was perhaps never fully committed to photography in black and white, the lesson would be more easily and naturally learned, enabling him to make these pictures: real photographs, bits lifted from the visceral world with such tact and cunning that they seem true, seen in color from corner to corner" (John Szarkowski, WILLIAM EGGLESTON'S GUIDE, exh. cat., New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1976, p. 12).
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