South of normal

William Eggleston exhibit presents casual as classic

NEW YORK - What may be the most notable art photograph of the last 40 years shows a tricycle. That's it, a toddler's three-wheeler. It's kind of ratty, too, a definite Toys 'R Us reject. Sure, you can also see two ranch houses and a car in a breezeway, they're in the background, and a patch of dead grass, some asphalt, and a mess of gray sky. But the entire scene is all very, well, negligible.

Or is it? The grass and asphalt almost eerily mirror the sky as neutral space. The trike is shot in such a way as to dominate the foreground, like a chariot of very youthful gods. And the chromatic play of red handle grips with green seat and frame verges on the luscious. The whole thing is a model of unobtrusive artistry amid the nondescript everyday.

Who would ever notice such a scene and bother to record it? No one really did until William Eggleston came along. As he likes to say, "I am at war with the obvious." The photographer's bewildering greatness - not too strong an adjective, not too strong a noun - is the subject of what must be this year's most splendid photography retrospective, "William Eggleston: Democratic Camera, Photographs and Video, 1961-2008." It runs at New York's Whitney Museum of American Art until Jan. 25.

That's an imposing title for such a forthrightly unimposing body of work, but it fits. "I had this notion," Eggleston has said, "of what I called a democratic way of looking around: that nothing was more important or less important."

Suspending judgment but not discrimination, Eggleston's camera conveys a sense of bland, deadpan wonder. His blend of single-mindedness, simplicity, and unemphatic intensity is unique - and uniquely American. His photographs can look like the world's most cunning snapshots: pictures anyone could have taken but only Eggleston did.

Eggleston turns 70 next year, and the Whitney has brought together more than 150 of his photographs, a few books and other publications featuring his work, and two quite bizarre videos, the diaristic "Stranded in Canton," from the early '70s, and the uncharacteristically abstract "Moving," from 1980.

Above and beyond the intrinsic offhand beauty of Eggleston's images, there are two things that make his body of work so important. First, he did more than anyone else to make color acceptable in art photography. Color reproduction had been feasible for decades. It had become increasingly common in advertising, magazine journalism, and fashion. Amateur photographers gloried in color; those carousels of Kodachrome slides gathering dust in countless garages are so many cenotaphs of visual consumerism.

"Serious" photography was a different matter. Just as marble was always white and ebony always black, serious photography was always black and white. Everyone knew that - or almost everyone. Eggleston didn't, nor did Joel Meyerowitz, Stephen Shore, Joel Sternfeld, William Christenberry (a friend of Eggleston's), and a few other young photographers in the late '60s and first half of the '70s. It was the 75 dye transfer prints in "Photographs by William Eggleston," a 1976 show at New York's Museum of Modern Art, that initially shocked, and ultimately transformed, the photographic world. The show's catalog bore the name "William Eggleston's Guide," and the catalog's cover bore his photograph of that tricycle. Think of it as William Eggleston's vehicle.

No less important was the way Eggleston's content could be as disconcerting as his form. Photography had a long tradition of celebrating ostensibly banal objects, but they were noble banal objects, such as tools or eccentric signage. Eggleston photographed an oven interior, an overhead light bulb, lawn furniture, and, of course, that tricycle. Bad enough to take a picture of a beehive hairdo - but to take one from behind? Some of the pictures could almost be mistaken for ads, they so ably mixed the arresting and mundane - but ads for products no one would ever think to buy. Almost single-handedly, Eggleston created a classicism of the casual.

There is nothing innate about banality, after all. It's something superimposed, a cultural assumption. What makes Eggleston's work so breathtaking is its utter lack of all such aesthetic baggage. This absence can lend his photography a slightly Martian quality, as if he's an inspector from another planet (which isn't necessarily a bad way to describe the Mississippi Delta, from where Eggleston hails). This inspector is intelligent and cultivated, clearly; but he never assumes.

"I've tried to make a lot of different photographs as if a human did not take them," he's said. "Not that a machine took them, but that maybe something took them that was not merely confined to walking on the earth. And I can't fly, but I can make experiments."

Although Eggleston has lived in the South nearly all his life, and many of his finest images are unthinkable above the Mason-Dixon Line, he should never be thought of as a regionalist. The Whitney show includes pictures from Berlin, Kyoto, Japan, and, best of all, the set of images collectively named "Los Alamos" that Eggleston took on road trips during the late '60s and early '70s. He took these photographs not just at the New Mexico home of the famous weapons lab but throughout the Southwest and as far afield as California. So explosive a name is apt, though. The pictures explode, all right: with color, weirdness, unexpectedness.

In one of them, we see a supermarket bag boy shoving a row of carts into the store. The way his face takes the light (it has to be Southwestern, it's that clear and sharp), he's practically exalted. Maybe when he was younger he owned that tricycle? The light's so luminous, it's easy to overlook the subtlest effect in the image: the delicate play of shadows on the supermarket wall.

One of Eggleston's inspirations in the early '60s was Cartier-Bresson. It's hard to exaggerate the incongruity of this. "The decisive instant," Cartier-Bresson's celebrated phrase for the snatching of a moment in time, seems so alien to Eggleston's procedure. Throughout his photography there's a very Southern sense of accumulated time rendered rather than instant in time captured. That's presumably why there's such little sense of upheaval in these pictures, even though so many of the most striking ones were taken during the social upheaval of the late '60s and early '70s.

Eggleston initially worked in black and white. He'd already found his raw material: drive-ins, parking lots, empty rooms - unremarked-upon remarkableness. The early images are extremely good. But black and white denies such a thick layer of information that it seems inevitable Eggleston would abandon it for color. Surely, another attraction of color was its being considered beyond the pale. Being beyond the pale is what Eggleston's photography has always been about.

Eggleston tends to avoid titles, other than geographic locations. This makes perfect sense. He's a completely non-literary artist; they're another form of cultural assumption. It's the image - what was right there on the lens and now in front of your eyes - that matters. It's not any idea behind or around or underneath it. His pictures cut out any middle man, poetic, philosophical, or otherwise. Alfred Stieglitz called his cloud pictures "Equivalents." Minor White could have used that title for pretty much every picture he took. There is nothing equivalent for Eggleston. What is is and that's what he records.

Mark Feeney can be reached at mfeeney@globe.com.