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Toward a Democracy of Seeing: William Eggleston and the Achievement of Southern Photography

Review products

WilliamEggleston, The Beautiful Mysterious: The Extraordinary Gaze of William Eggleston (Museum and House Series, Volume 1) (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2019, $28.00). Pp. 144 + 66 color photographs. isbn978 1 4968 2234 5.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 July 2020

RICHARD KING*
Affiliation:
Department of American and Canadian Studies, University of Nottingham. Email: Richard.King@Nottingham.ac.uk.

Extract

Something about the way the South looks has long fascinated outsiders and southerners alike. It seems to invite the stunning cover of William Eggleston's The Beautiful Mysterious, which is a blue-tinged, illuminated, nearly empty, parking lot. Another example: the “rust aesthetic” associated with the banged-up signs so common in William Christenberry's photographs seems like an authentic southern thing. In fact, a certain orange-brown, rustlike color permeates many of the photographs in The Beautiful Mysterious. A more shocking visual signifier of southernness has historically been the lynched black body, as, for example, that of Emmett Till in 1955. As it turns out, Eggleston (b. 1939) grew up in Sumner, MS where the murderers of the Chicago teenager were put on trial – and acquitted.

Type
Review Essay
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press and British Association for American Studies 2020

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References

1 Holborn, Mark, Introduction, in Eggleston, William, Ancient and Modern (London: Jonathan Cape, 2002), 1126Google Scholar.

2 Eggleston, The Beautiful Mysterious, 82.

3 Ibid., 81–84.

4 Richard McCabe cited in ibid., 105.

5 Cited in Ibid., 14, 75.

6 Cited in William Eggleston, Ancient and Modern, 13.

7 Michael Almereyda, cited in Eggleston, The Beautiful Mysterious, 128.

8 See ibid., 94, for a brief discussion of this issue.