Knowing the Dancer From the Dance
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“William Eggleston in the Real World,” a documentary by Michael Almereyda, is a movie about a guy wandering around with a camera and going “click.” The movie begins at night in Mayfield, Ky., the hometown of filmmaker Gus Van Sant, who commissioned Mr. Eggleston to photograph it. Mr. Eggleston is a man in his mid-60s, tall and slim, with a handsome but somewhat used, Waspy profile. He wears a tan car-coat, walks with a slight limp (the result of an accident), and carries a Mamiya 7 II medium format rangefinder camera with a top-mounted optical viewfinder, a tool only a professional would use. Sporadically he brings it to his eye, and after the briefest of intervals goes “click.”
Mr. Eggleston’s son, Winston, also a photographer, tags along behind him, not so much assisting as just being there so that when his father makes a terse comment he won’t seem to be muttering to himself. The two move along the deserted streets of this small Southern city, checking out the goods for sale in the brightly lit shop windows – “click” – and the dazzle of the neon signs and traffic lights against the asphalt and shadowed buildings – “click.” This goes on for a long, long time.
W.B. Yeats ends “Among School Children,” one of the great poems of his old age, with the unanswerable question, “How can we know the dancer from the dance?” This is a matter that concerns only the modern artist and his audience. In classical societies the artist was a conservator and transmitter of the received culture: The standard for truth, beauty, and authenticity was how well the work comported with the tradition. We do not know, in most cases, the names of the carvers of the magnificent statues in medieval European cathedrals, or of their Hindu and Buddhist counterparts, because knowing who they were did not matter to the worshippers who admired – even adored – their work.
But in our period an artist is expected to be an innovator of an evolving culture. Among the standards by which his work is judged is the perceived authenticity of his unique personality. We study the lives of the makers of art because we hope it will give us some insight into their work. So important has knowing the artist become that we now study the work to know the artist better. Thus, in the wee hours of the night, a film crew follows William Eggleston and his son through the chilly streets of Mayfield, trying to parse the photographer from his prints, the dancer from the dance.
John Szarkowski, the influential former director of the department of photography at the Museum of Modern Art considers that “William Eggleston is the beginning of color photography.” I think his broad endorsement slights the important role of Ernst Haas, but there is no denying Mr. Eggleston’s impact.
When Mr. Szarkowski organized the 1976 exhibition at MoMA that made Mr. Eggleston’s reputation – the first individual exhibition of color photography at the museum – it was described by the New York Times as “the most hated show of the year.” Many were puzzled or offended by his casual, seemingly indifferent, choices of subject matter, which included close-ups of children’s toys, landscapes littered with empty plastic milk containers, and portraits of Southerners more closely related to Faulkner’s Snopes and latter-day Compsons than to his noble and tragic deSpains. And all of these subjects, human and inanimate, were shown in splotches of deeply saturated dye-transfer color that frequently passed from vivid to outright garish.
But Mr. Eggleston’s idiosyncratic eye was admired by those who appreciated his contestation with the visible part of the light spectrum, and his democratic – almost mystic – acceptance of the great “what is.” As color photography has come into common use in photojournalism and art photography, his work seems less strange. Today, in terms of gallery and museum exhibitions, publications, print sales, commissions, grants, general respect, and influence on other artists, he is one of America’s most successful photographers.
Almereyda’s film follows Mr. Eggleston and his son as they leave Mayfield in their rented car and stop by the side of the highway to explore an abandoned wooden house in an advanced state of crumpling. Eggleston spies the pattern of bright sunlight and dark shadows on the rotting floorboards – “click” – and the slope of the collapsing green roof – “click.”
The film tells us about the photographer’s close relationship with his maternal grandfather, who gave him his first camera at 9. It suggests a psychological connection between the trauma of the grandfather’s death the following year and the young boy’s passion for photography. There is a scene where Mr. Eggleston doodles quite competently with colored pencils while his friend Leigh Haizlip lounges in pajamas and rambles on tipsily about what she would do if she got cancer. There are scenes of Mr. Eggleston playing the piano, also quite competently, and talking about music. We see footage of him stoically going up to receive the Getty Images Lifetime Achievement Award at the International Center of Photography, so we appreciate his stature and indifference. His wife Rosa goes through the family album, proudly showing some of his earliest work. Then she and William have a drink. Throughout the film there are quick clips of Mr. Eggleston’s photographs, so we know what his wandering about and going “click” results in.
Mr. Eggleston is famously unwilling to discuss his pictures; those who do it for him put them in the context of the sociology of the American south in the second half of the 20th century, or as a critique of what is perceived as the banality of American physical culture. But they are best understood, as Zen koans are, in terms of themselves: as photography – color photography – liberated from easy meanings. Mr. Eggleston obviously agreed to be in this documentary, but I think he did it as a taunt: not to give access to his work, but to ensure its mystification.
In “The Silicon Eye,” George Gilder quotes Anya Hurlbert and Tomaso Poggio as saying, “vision is not a sense but an intelligence.” That sums up my understanding of Semir Zeki’s “Vision of the Brain,” the standard medical school text on sight. We know a lot about the physiology of the eye – how electrical and chemical reactions transmit the effects of light waves bounced off material objects to the different parts of the brain that process color, form, motion, and direction – but we don’t know how all this snapping and crackling of neurons and ganglia is constructed into the “picture” we see. In other words, how brain becomes mind.
So we still don’t know how William Eggleston is able to see patterns and significant relationships that elude others, to go “click” when no one else would see anything worth recording, This is an interesting film, but how the photographer does what he does remains obscure: The dancer and the dance go bounding off the stage in a breathtaking leap that defies our expectations of gravity. “Click.”
At Film Forum until September 13 (209 W. Houston Street, between Varick Street and Sixth Avenue, 212-627-2035).