of rust and decay, counter the Pop images Warhol
produced—clean, bright images of commercial pro-
ducts and popular icons. As Warhol’s images are
about production, Eggleston’s are about consump-
tion; as Warhol’s images present popular icons of
American life, Eggleston presents ordinary, nameless
Americans. Eggleston shows the grittier, real-life side
of the idealized world Warhol presented.
The creation of iconic imagery attracted Eggle-
ston to Walker Evans, whose work Eggleston
praised for ‘‘elevating the casual, the everyday and
the literal into specific, permanent symbols’’ (Hol-
born 1992, 12). Eggleston shared Evans’s goal of
glorifying the commonplace. Eggleston also points
out where their interests diverge: Evans, like most
photographers of the mid-twentieth century, used a
square-on, perfectly frontal shot, which Eggleston
avoids religiously.
The unusual perspectivesand anglesofEggleston’s
photographs work with his uninhabited, stark scenes
to create a sense of unease in many of his images. His
frequent depictions of neglected buildings, rusty
signs, and dirty streets further the sense of a darkness
lurking beneath his colorful surfaces, as inThe
Louisiana Project, 1980. In photographs such as
Untitled(Toilet), 1970, the low perspective, seen as
though lying on the floor, casts a menacing shadow
on the scene. The harsh juxtaposition of the eerie
pool of red light glowing beyond the green wall
intensifies the sickly, ominous atmosphere.
The power of color inUntitled(Toilet) points to
the additional experiences that black and white
photography cannot suggest. Color intensifies the
emotional dimension of his works—sinister or beau-
tiful—and infuses his photographs with a sense of
immediacy: his scenes seem familiar, more directly
connected to our own lives than scenes in black and
white, which divorce color from content and empha-
size the separation between art and reality.
Eggleston is especially well-known for his use of
the dye transfer process of color printing, which he
first encountered while teaching at Harvard Uni-
versity in 1973–1974. The dye transfer process
creates intense, saturated colors on a rich surface
created with layers of dyes. Not only does this
layering of colors create a luscious, tactile surface,
it also allows the artist to adjust each color inde-
pendent of the others, permitting greater variation
of emphasis and subordination in the overall color
scheme. Publishing his first portfolio of dye trans-
fer prints,14 Pictures, in 1974, Eggleston was one
of the earliest photographers to use the dye trans-
fer process for non-commercial purposes.
Also in 1974, Eggleston completed his projectLos
Alamos. He had taken the series of more than 2,000
photographs over the period of 1967–1974, during
travels across the United States, from Memphis to
New Orleans, Southern California, Las Vegas, and
NewMexico.Thevastserieswasnamedafterstopping
at the nuclear research site Los Alamos, New Mexico.
Although Eggleston has lived his entire life in the
South, he hastens to avoid being dubbed a ‘‘South-
ern’’ artist. On his extensive travels, which help
shield him from the ‘‘Southern’’ label, he has photo-
graphed throughout the United States as well as in
Austria, the Caribbean, China, England, Egypt,
Germany, Japan, Kenya, Poland, Spain, and South
Africa. His goal is to treat his photographs as inde-
pendent of place: to approach images from his native
South in the same way as pictures from Poland or
Kenya. He purposefully tries to eliminate elements
of his photographs that tie them too closely to a
place, including elements that characterize his work
as ‘‘Southern.’’
Self-imposed constraints are common in Eggle-
ston’s oeuvre. In his seriesWedgwood Blue, Eggle-
ston photographed the sky with the restriction of
only directing his camera straight up. This limited
viewpoint captured perfectly ordinary but frequently
beautiful scenes, including wispy clouds, fragments
of tree branches, and portions of power lines, but
avoided the more banal photographic subject of the
horizon. This unexpected approach to the ordinary
is typical of Eggleston’s work.
He used a similar limitation when photographing
on commission from AT&T in 1978, when he took
pictures along the 32nd parallel. The artist removed
himself from the process of content selection; instead,
he randomly regimented the process by photograph-
ing at timed intervals. Two years earlier, Eggleston
had further removed himself from the process by
shooting pictures without peering through the cam-
era’s viewfinder. He would aim and shoot, sensing
the angle he desired rather than precisely arranging
his composition before his lens. He felt that working
away from the viewfinder allowed him to look more
intensely at his surroundings.
The Democratic Forest(1989), a project docu-
mented by a book of the same name, included
over 10,000 prints created ‘‘democratically,’’ with-
out respect to the academic hierarchy of subject
matter. The ‘‘democratic camera’’ captures each
subject with the assumption that everything—
whether a person or a clump of grass—is equally
valid subject matter, thereby upending traditional
hierarchies of subject matter.
Writer Mark Holborn traces the roots of this idea
of the democratic camera to Eggleston’s ex-
perimentation with video, begun in 1973 and con-
tinuing in 1978, when Eggleston’s friend RickyEGGLESTON, WILLIAM