Film: William Eggleston in the Real World

JTF (just the facts): Released in 2005 by Palm Pictures (here). 87 minutes. Directed by Michael Almereyda. (DVD cover shot at right, via Amazon.)

Comments/Context: If you like your documentary biographies to be thorough and orderly, covering the span of the subject's life chronologically from beginning to end, with a deeper focus on the important highlights from the person's history, drawing conclusions about his/her larger influence in the world around us, then you will likely find this film highly unsatisfying. For the most part, this biopic is a series of reality vignettes, shot on hand held video: casual conversations, working photography trips, car rides, piano playing, downtime with family and friends, exhibition visits, and quiet walking. It gets into Eggleston's personal space and follows him around, silently tracking him as he works, watching as his eccentricities come forward. In the end, Eggleston remains stubbornly elusive, but the movie does a terrific job of capturing fragments of the fabric of his life.

I enjoyed most the segments of Eggleston actually shooting. There are many scenes where he is wandering, looking at unspectacular shop fronts or store windows, intermittently taking one or two pictures and then moving on. He stares at the giant rooster on top of a restaurant, a sideways pinata resting on a refrigerated case in a convenience store, and a cardboard man in a dinner jacket stuck against a deep green wall. Often, he is just walking and looking, both during the day and at night, with his parka hood over his head, his son Winston following at a distance to aid with a camera or a tripod. On the way back to Memphis, they stop to look at an abandoned house for sale along the roadside. It has a geometric green roof (that happens to be falling in), a spray painted sign, and amazing soft light and shadows in the empty interior rooms. By watching Eggleston move around and select his pictures, you can begin to see how his brain works, how his eye is drawn to certain compositions and color effects.

I also liked the sequence of Eggleston visiting his show at the Getty, riding the tram, taking pictures of the buildings like any other tourist, and wandering among the images on display, apparently without anyone recognizing who he was. The film claims he has made over 250000 photographs to date in his life, and he makes the comment that he liked the selection of pictures the curators had chosen. This seems to be emblematic of his reluctant approach to the art world; he hadn't obsessively controlled the exhibition, but rather he seemed like an outsider, viewing the work as something pleasant, but entirely foreign. In other parts of the film, he makes the shortest possible acceptance speech for a lifetime achievement award, and refuses to engage in a discourse that the director wants to have about the underlying theoretical aspects of his work. He dismisses these issues as patently wrong and misguided, and not at all how he approaches his art; he seems to have no interest in putting his aesthetics into words, or thinks trying to do so is an impossible and generally stupid idea.

The film also does an excellent job of showing how varied Eggleston's artistic pursuits really are. He plays a synthesized organ and a regular piano, composing his own symphonies (played loud), and he draws intensely with pastels and colored pencils. Between moments of normal human ordinariness, with a heavy dose of drinking and smoking, he seems to be constantly creating, editing, looking and processing, generally only intermittently aware of the chaos or silence around him.

Overall, I think the film does a solid job of creating an eclectic yet somehow rounded picture of Eggleston as a fascinating, contradictory mix: talented, vulnerable, charming, eccentric, and stubborn. For those who want an unvarnished, unfinished view of the artist rather than a heroic historicized timeline, this documentary will be well worth putting in your Netflix queue.

Transit Hub:

• Eggleston Trust (here)
• Movie reviews: SF Chronicle (here), LA Times (here), Boston Globe (here)

A Few Thoughts on Herb and Dorothy

This past weekend, we watched the terrific documentary Herb & Dorothy (here), about the legendary art collectors, Herb and Dorothy Vogel. I came away with quite a few conclusions and lessons about collecting from hearing their story once again (we had of course heard about them before seeing this movie):

1.) Even when the walls of your house look full, there really is room to jam in much more.

2.) If you don't have kids, you can go to a lot of midweek art openings and become happily embedded in the community.

3.) If you don't have kids, there is more disposable income available in your budget for purchasing art.

4.) Collecting as a husband and wife team makes the collecting much more fun. (We already knew this.)

5.) Picking an out of favor (or "emerging") area to collect makes the collecting easier and cheaper (for them it was conceptual and minimal art). The artists who are unknown or under appreciated will be particularly glad to see you.

6.) Buying directly from artists (who become your friends) gets you a better pick of the best of what's available and makes your money go substantially farther. (It will also almost certainly anger the dealers who you are going around.) Coming cash in hand makes the process much smoother.

7.) If you build a huge collection (the Vogels had 4000 pieces), even an institution like the National Gallery cannot (and will not) absorb it all. Better to develop a back-up plan for the ultimate resting place of the artworks just in case. (After the NGA took 1000 works off the top, the Vogels developed the 50x50 plan, where every state in the union gets 50 works from their collection.)

8.) The whole narrative that the Vogels are "unlikely" collectors seems a little insulting/condescending I think. Collectors of all kinds are driven by the wonder of seeing; the Vogels are no different. That they successfully maximized the buying power of their limited budget over a long period of time is a testament to their determination as collectors.

All in, even though it is not photography per se, the film is certainly worth putting in your Netflix queue.

Is Florian Maier-Aichen Overrated?

The world of contemporary photography is filled with exciting artists pursuing a wide variety of picture making strategies and approaches. But once in a while a photographer comes along whose meteoric rise takes your breath away. Florian Maier-Aichen was a complete unknown to us until his work started to appear in the Contemporary Art auctions a year or so ago. With no auction history prior to 2008, his work was suddenly and routinely fetching six figures, a feat that rarely occurs in contemporary photography, much less with fresh names. Diving back into his bio, his work was included in the 2006 Whitney Biennial, and he is now represented by 303 Gallery in New York (here) and Blum & Poe in Los Angeles (here), with a recent show at Gagosian Gallery in London (here).

Maier-Aichen had a show at 303 last spring (review here), which was our first in-person experience of his work, and I have to say I was somewhat underwhelmed; the images didn’t seem to match the hype created by the PR machine. But we are always willing to admit our own ignorance, so I chalked it up to just not understanding the work well enough and somehow missing the artist’s hidden (at least to us) genius. So it was with some anticipation that I sat down recently to watch the segment on Maier-Aichen in the Art 21 series on PBS (here).

In the short documentary piece, Maier-Aichen talks through a few images that he has been working on, as well as his overall approach to picture making. As a refresher for those less familiar with his work, Maier-Aichen takes large format color images (many of them post card-like landscapes) and then does a significant amount of digital post processing on the computer to create his works: negatives are sandwiched to create color irregularities, new elements are drawn in by hand using a digital stylus, and other details are eliminated or made less distinct/realistic. All of this rework has the effect of making parts of the images look remarkably painterly and hand crafted, while others retain some of the documentary preciseness of the original photograph; the representational and the abstract have been mixed.

In the past decade or so, we have certainly seen a faction of photographers react against the cool and rigorous conceptual detachment of the Becher school and move back toward a more painterly style of photography using digital tools (or via a return to older techniques and processes), some overtly embracing a Neo-Pictorialist sensibility. Lynn Geesaman’s images of elaborate European gardens would be one accomplished example of this line of thinking.

Given what I saw in the Art 21 segment, Maier-Aichen doesn’t really fit into this category of artists and work, even though there are certainly some commonalities of thinking. He doesn’t appear to be trying to make his photographs look like paintings (or more “beautiful” in some traditional sense), but to be making his photographs look less like photographs, via introducing areas of hand crafted artistry (this may be splitting hairs I realize, but I think the distinction is real). His central idea seems to be the undermining of the precision of the photograph for a more open ended, less predetermined state, where realism (especially in the case of iconic views such as Half Dome in Yosemite or various night views of waterfront cities) has been transformed into something more fictional and unknown. For me, this feels like an elaborate conceptual construct – perhaps Maier-Aichen is the first of the Conceptual Pictorialists.

Intellectually, having seen this video, I think I can now resonate a bit more with what Maier-Aichen is aiming to do, and I will happily grant that he is both out there trying something that no one else is really doing (especially in the realm of the landscape as a subject) and likely building a bridge to a new kind of working style for hand edited digital photography that others may value and follow in time. I also think I can follow the story line of the German photographer going to UCLA, reconsidering the idea of the American frontier and bringing a less deterministic approach to views we have all seen before.

But I’m afraid I have to admit that these works still don’t do much for me – while they might make me think a bit about what he is doing and saying (especially the idea of incorporating “drawing” in the digital sense), they don’t excite me or generate much emotion. As a collector, I continually come back to the opportunity cost of capital, and I can’t really understand the calculus of how I would come to the conclusion that spending $100K on a Maier-Aichen would make sense in the context of all that is available at that price point across the history of the medium. Which brings me back to the question in the title: is Maier-Aichen overrated? Has the buzz gotten ahead of the substance?

And so I open the floor to the rest of you, either to shout me down or voice your agreement. My goal here is not to drag Maier-Aichen down with zingers from the cheap seats; I'd like to have a thoughtful discussion of the merits of his work, which is what I have tried to provide above. What I would like most is to have someone out there deliver an impassioned, concise, and rational argument defending Maier-Aichen’s place in the contemporary photography hierarchy, as evidenced by his prices. Walk me through the logic of how you write the big check: I am eager to be educated.

Documenting the Face of America: Roy Stryker and the FSA/OWI Photographers

A thought-provoking documentary on the FSA photographers recently aired on PBS, and I finally got around to watching it over the weekend (after saving it on the DVR when it originally ran on August 18th). I must admit that prior to seeing this film, my knowledge of the FSA was limited to a few high points: Walker Evans in Alabama, Dorothea Lange's Migrant Mother, and maybe Arthur Rothstein's dust bowl pictures.

So let's start with a bit of background that I learned from this documentary, which while obvious to experts in the field I'm sure, was generally new to me. Starting in the mid 1920s, rural America, and those engaged in agriculture more specifically, started a period of steady decline, as commodity prices around the globe came down after the end WWI. When the financial markets crashed in 1929, a broad and deep depression gripped virtually all parts of the country. As FDR worked to get his New Deal programs passed through Congress, it became clear to him that Washington and much of urban America was out of touch with the suffering going on in rural communities across the nation. People were not up in arms about rural poverty, or the plight of sharecroppers and tenant farmers, or the larger and larger numbers of displaced people and migrant workers. A sustained political effort was going to be needed to change people's perceptions; he needed a way to "introduce America to Americans" and thus was born the idea of sending photographers out to document what was happening.

Roy Stryker was brought in to run this effort, and he gathered together the photographers, gave them assignments, defended his budget to Congress, and generally got things done. Over the period of 1935-1943, this effort was housed in a variety of places: the historical unit of the Resettlement Administration, the Farm Security Administration, and later, the Office of War Information. Throughout this time, all of the pictures were gathered together into one "big file" (which eventually ended up at the Library of Congress). Here's a list of the photographers mentioned in the documentary who contributed to the effort:

Esther Bubley
John Collier Jr.
Jack Delano
Walker Evans
Dorothea Lange
Russell Lee
Edwin Locke
Carl Mydans
Gordon Parks
Edwin & Louise Rosskam
Arthur Rothstein
Ben Shahn
John Vachon
Marion Post Wolcott

The documentary follows a generally historical timeline, interspersed with vignettes and anecdotes about specific photographers. There are interviews with Louise Rosskam and Gordon Parks which are particularly interesting, and more gossipy tidbits are thrown in periodically for flair (Walker Evans was the first one fired from the FSA, since he wouldn't follow the rules and manage his budget; Marian Post Wolcott was so beautiful that she often wasn't taken seriously etc.). The iconic images from this period are also given a fuller treatment, with discussion of how and why the pictures came to be taken.

In general, this is a terrific documentary that is well worth an hour of your time. I think it also begs the question of how and where today's documentary pictures are being stored and archived. While we think of the group above and others (like Margaret Bourke-White and Weegee) as "artists" today, in their time, they were photojournalists. So who is taking care of the flood of images being created by the photojournalists of today?

By the way, there is also a very fine website in support of the film, which can be found here.