William Eggleston’s Lonely South

Eggleston, however, used color in a different way: he employed the bright shock effect of advertising—Drink Coca-Cola! Drive this Buick!—but separated it from capitalism. There’s so much junk in Eggleston’s pictures. Junked cars, used cars, dusty parked cars, cars going nowhere or maybe about to go somewhere. In one of his most famous images, “Memphis”—it’s not in the Zwirner show—we see a tricycle parked on a suburban street. The tricycle is shot from below, at an angle that renders it monumental. And if you look between its wheels, you can see a car parked in the garage of a ranch house. The tricycle frames the car just as Eggleston frames the tricycle. The world is a series of frames. For me, this image, so simple and heartfelt, is about time. We all go from the tricycle to the car to the grave, under that big sky. But what happens to us in between? That’s part of what “The Last Dyes” addresses: the days we live in. Days upon days. Though the ostensible reason for the show is to exhibit Eggleston’s dye-transfer prints—a painstaking process (no longer in use) in which three film matrices are separately submerged in dye and then pressed and rolled onto a dye-receptive fibre paper to create a single image—the outmoded technique only underlines the show’s concern with temporality.

Made up of thirty-one photographs (with ample space between them for the viewer to dive into one without feeling distracted by another), “The Last Dyes” presents a world that feels fictional but fact-based, as if you were reading a true-crime novel. The truth here is Eggleston’s love not only of images but of beauty—or of what he considers beautiful. Part of his great accomplishment was to take the European aesthetic of beauty and redefine it for the South, with its heat and its billboards, its indolence and humor and thick nights. Indeed, one of the more astonishing pictures in the show combines all of these last three elements. At first, it is difficult to make out “Untitled” (c. 1972)—it’s a dark image—but then it starts to find you. Oh! Look! I recognize that crumpled pack of Winstons in the ashtray, your mind says. That receptacle must be in a car. What is that shape in the car, though? It’s a woman’s head thrown back—we guess this only because of the long strands of hair across her face, long dark hair that seems to be of a piece with her sort of fuzzy apparel. They’re all there, Eggleston’s signifiers: the brand name, the partially unseen (and thus unknown) person, the textures and colors of mysterious night. In this image, Eggleston grabs at what Flannery O’Connor, in her 1960 novel “The Violent Bear It Away,” called “this lonesome place”: the lonesome place of being, doubly lonesome because it’s in the South, the dumping ground for all that tremendous industry and hatred, constantly in the throes of reconstruction—even if no one remembers that word. It takes a long time to understand what you’re seeing in this photograph, but once you do the picture seems to belong to you.