The Color Line, Revisited

Pick up just about any account of photographic history and you’ll find, among the recorded milestones, a division between color photography Before Eggleston and color photography After.

Before, as the histories tell it, color was deemed appropriate only for advertising and commercial photographic work. After William Eggleston was featured in a solo show at the Museum of Modern Art in 1976, color photography was officially embraced as a legitimate medium of artistic expression.

Eggleston gets credit as the revolutionary, but it was the choice of Eggleston as the anointed one that was the radical move, and that was the work of kingmaker John Szarkowski, MoMA’s legendarily persuasive curator of photography at the time. Eggleston’s work itself is often unremarkable, insistently unremarkable, and there were others working in color just as soon and as extensively as he was when technical advances made color film cheap and accessible in the late 1960s and early ‘70s.

But Szarkowski’s take on things stuck, and Eggleston’s work remains regarded as color photography’s base line, a view reinforced by the J. Paul Getty Museum’s three-part show “William Eggleston and the Color Tradition.”

Alternately maddening and engrossing, the show represents a substantial addition and direction to the Getty’s photography collection, based on three recent gifts: a collection of Eggleston prints donated by the photographer’s longtime patron Caldecot Chubb; a selection of more recent work by color photographers given by Nancy and Bruce Berman; and John Divola’s 1977-78 “Zuma Series,” a promised gift of Michael and Jane Wilson.

Eggleston’s photographs, the cornerstone of the show, are knotted with irony. Made in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s throughout Georgia, Mississippi, Louisiana and Tennessee (where he was born in 1939), these snatches of the banal seem to shun attention rather than invite or reward it. They offer as little as possible in the way of subject or form to ingratiate themselves with a thinking, feeling viewer.

Though Eggleston might be momentarily entranced by rays of golden light streaking across a kitchen sink, he’s more likely to find inspiration in the frost-laced contents of a freezer or, under a bed, contemplating stray coins and overturned shoes on the musty carpet.

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Eggleston (who is also featured in a show of both older and recent work at the Gallery of Contemporary Photography in Santa Monica, through Nov. 27) makes unlikely pictures in unlikely places, and under his gaze the ordinary--puddles in a dirt road, a heap of garbage bags, the interior of a house, the exterior--rarely transcends itself but instead remains relentlessly ordinary. The mundane--the bare bulb in a deep red ceiling, the dog drinking out of a muddy puddle--can be cause for celebration, but it can also elicit quiet desperation.

Eggleston’s work avoids committing itself one way or the other. It is nothing if not democratic, but a visual passion exercised this democratically cancels itself out, dwindling into an overall malaise of dispassion.

An early interest in the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson inspired Eggleston, though he repudiates Cartier-Bresson’s “decisive moment” aesthetic, which holds that elements of a scene choreograph themselves into a brief, harmonious unity. He favors the flat, indifferent time of place without plot.

At their best, his works read like location shots, glimpses of texture and mood that might feed into a larger fictive or filmic vision.

His concentration on the vernacular borrows heavily from Walker Evans, whose legacy is more substantively fulfilled in the work of Jim Dow, Adam Bartos and especially Alex Harris, all included in the Bermans’ gift of recent color photography. Evans practiced a form of cultural anthropology with his camera, scrutinizing the American social landscape and its players with cool, unromanticized clarity. Eggleston follows Evans’ lead but with far greater detachment.

The 10 photographers represented in the Berman selection restore heart and soul to the practice. Harris’ image of an elderly Latino’s house in New Mexico, with concrete floor and tin foil wallpaper, is a resounding echo of Evans’ pictures of coal miners’ and tenant farmers’ homes. Artistic legacy deepens the image; the continuity of poverty in America complicates it.

Of more than 200 photographs in the Bermans’ gift, only two dozen are exhibited here, but it’s a rich, meaty group that demonstrates how deftly artists have stretched the emotional range of documentary photography.

The third section of the show, which was organized by the museum’s Judith Keller and Mikka Gee, veers in another direction entirely.

For his “Zuma Series,” John Divola approached an abandoned lifeguard station near Malibu as a found object, photographing its interior altered by paint, shifting conditions of light, and the impact of being used as a practice ground for local firefighters. The abused interior frames glorious views of the sea and sky, and this contrast between the transient and the absolute thickens the visual drama of these otherwise abstract studies in color and texture.

These are the Getty’s first substantial holdings in color photography, and they bring the museum’s collection unexpectedly to the present. The hierarchy suggested in the show--with Eggleston as the epicenter and the rest aftershocks--is standard but skewed. Where the collection goes from here, how it’s filled in and rounded out, will be equally revealing.

* “William Eggleston and the Color Tradition,” J. Paul Getty Museum, 1200 Getty Center Drive, (310) 440-7300, through Jan. 30. Closed Mondays.