Image Copyright The Eggleston Artist Trust

If you live in NYC or happen to visit soon, William Eggleston has a retrospective show at The Whitney Museum of American Art. Democratic Camera Photographs and Video 1961-2008 is up now until January 25, 2009.

The show includes a wonderful sampling of Eggleston’s work including images from his famous Guide monograph and his Los Alamos and Mississippi Delta series. There are also some photos he shot at Graceland I had never seen, and some newer work as well. Most of the photographs in the show are dye-transfer prints which are beautiful to see in person. There are a few pigment prints (which are larger and in my opinion not as nice) and quite a few photographs deemed “exhibition prints”, whatever that means.

If you are at all a fan of Eggleston’s work, or late 60s/70s color photography, go check it out. Its also nice to view his images and compare them to other similar photographs shot by other photographers. (Like Philip-Lorca DiCorcia’s freezer shot from A Storybook Life, which looks a lot like Eggleston’s freezer shot, above) I love the notion of needing to make these images, not just as an homage, but as a necessity. A shared vision if you will.

*let’s just say that a few of my shots inexplicably look like Eggleston’s (and countless others). So is it because I knew his/their images (which, in most cases, I didn’t) or because it was a shared instinctual response? (this concept is explored by Geoff Dyer in The Ongoing Moment – a great read)