“After Eggleston” isn’t the first time I committed a collage intervention on another artist’s artwork. I had worked Carol M. Highsmith‘s photographs at the Library of Congress into the “Pod Tower Historical Society” series. But in 2024, when I came across the catalogue for “William Eggleston: Election Eve” at The Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC (10 December 1977-22 January 1978), I knew I wanted to make collage in conversation this work.

Inspired by Robert Frank, William Eggleston used color photography to elevate the everyday into fine art at a time when the medium’s potential was still suspect. Photography’s documentary potential was well-established from its inception. In the 21st century, we tend to see and experience old photographs in museums and galleries and, therefore, assume they were always thought of as art, but photography traveled a long road to be accepted as a fine art medium. In the mid-19th century, photomontagists Oscar Rejlander and Henry Peach Robinson were collaging art using a combination printing process. Starting in the late 19th century, the Pictorialists used the medium of photography to go beyond documentation and express ideas in images that were presented as art. Alfred Stieglitz organized the first fine art exhibition of photography in 1910, nicknamed the Buffalo Show, but in the 1930s, the Federal Art Project employed photographers as documentarians rather than as artists. Like collage artists, photographs have long been stepchildren in the art world.

As a boy, Eggleston attended The Webb School, the longest continuously operating boarding school in the South. “It was the kind of place where it was considered effeminate to like music and painting,” he later remarked. Later, while studying at Vanderbilt, a friend gave him a Leica camera. Inspired by The Decisive Moment (1952) by French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, Eggleston shot black-and-white candid, people-driven photographs of diners, gas stations, and supermarkets; the simple places of everyday life. He would later explain his philosophy, “I had this notion of what I called a democratic way of looking around: that nothing was more important or less important.”

Close friend and fellow Southerner William Christenberry introduced Eggleston to color transparencies in the early 1960s. Color photography was more expensive and required a commercial developing and printing service. Eggleston recalled, “I had a friend who had a job working nights at a photography lab where they processed snapshots and I’d go visit him because we were both night owls. I started looking at these pictures coming out—they’d come out in a long ribbon—and though most of them were accidents, some of them were absolutely beautiful, and I started spending all night looking at this ribbon of pictures…I started daydreaming about taking a particular kind of picture, because I figured if amateurs working with cheap cameras could do this, I could use good cameras and really come up with something.” When Eggleston first met John Szarkowski, director of photography at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), he reportedly showed the curator a suitcase full of drugstore color prints.

Shooting in color was different than using black and white film. “My first tries were ridiculous. I got some snapshots back, and I hadn’t exposed them properly, they were awful…I’d assumed that I could do in color what I could do in black and white, and I got a swift, harsh lesson. All bones bared. But it had to be. Then one night I stayed up figuring out what I was gonna do the next day, which was go to the big supermarket down the street, then called Montesi’s—why I don’t know. It seemed a good place to try things out. I had this new exposure system in mind, of overexposing the film so all the colors would be there. And by God, it all worked. Just overnight. The first frame, I remember, was a guy pushing grocery carts…those pictures revealed the beauty of light. That it was capturable.” Eggleston was embracing color at a time when color film technology was evolving. “Certain images work better with different processes. Kodachrome was the best film and Dye-transfer was the best print you could have made back then, so I used them. Color negative film and C-prints eventually improved greatly so I stopped using Kodachrome.”

Eggleston’s exhibition “Photographs by William Eggleston” at MoMA in 1976 cemented his reputation “as the color pioneer, the undisputed Father of Color Photography,” but as Sebastian Siadecki illustrated in a 2020 essay, that wasn’t entirely accurate. “Debunking this myth doesn’t diminish his importance, but it places his achievement in the proper context,” wrote Siadecki. The exhibition “was a groundbreaking moment in the history of color photography, and in particular for the acceptance of color photography in the fine art world. But many well-respected photographers had been experimenting with color work for decades, and quite a bit of this work had achieved exposure in the museum environment. The first solo exhibition of color photographs at MoMA was actually Eliot Porter’s ‘Birds in Color‘ all the way back in 1943, and the first significant show dedicated to color photography was a survey called ‘Color Photography‘ in 1950, curated by Edward Steichen and including artists such as Ansel Adams, Harry Callahan, Robert Capa, Elliott Erwitt, and even Weegee.”

At the time, The New York Times called the exhibition “the most hated show of the year.” Critical attack of Eggleston’s aesthetic choices and compositional approach failed to mask a hostility to his choice of subject and the South in general. “As color is now one of the ‘hot’ problems in this medium long dominated by black and white images, it would be news indeed if Mr. Eggleston’s pictures were the masterpieces they are claimed to be. In my opinion, they are not,” wrote Hilton Icramer in his 28 May 1976 review of the show. “He likes trucks, cars, tricycles, unremarkable suburban houses and dreary landscapes, too, and he especially likes his family and friends, who may, for all I know, be wonderful people, but who appear in these pictures as dismal figures inhabiting a commonplace world of little visual interest. The locations are Memphis, where Mr. Eggleston lives, and Tallahatchie County, Mississippi, where his family’s cotton farm is.” That Eggleston’s father was an engineer and his mother was the daughter of a prominent judge seemed to escape the elitist critic who seemed bent on suggesting Eggleston was a commoner whose eye and gaze were an unworthy contribution to culture.

Still, the 1976 exhibition most likely led Rolling Stone magazine to commission Eggleston to photograph the birthplace and hometown of presidential candidate Jimmy Carter. Jonah Goldman Kay told the story in a November 2020 article for The Paris Review, “On the eve of the 1976 election, William Eggleston traveled to Plains, Georgia, to photograph the hometown of Jimmy Carter. The landscapes he captured were overgrown yet restrained, rusting shacks and crooked tombstones. As he travels along the road from Mississippi to Georgia, the quiet buzz of anticipation grows. In Sumter, a car driving down the highway emerges from behind a small shack with advertisements painted on the side. In front, stalks of ryegrass bend with the wind. Every piece of the landscape, from its residents to the trees, is both fluid and static. The photographs in Election Eve emit an eerie quiet—a town on the precipice of transforming from a provincial backcountry to a presidential hometown.”

Rolling Stone ended up not using the photographs. Instead, they were shown the following year at The Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, which produced the small booklet I found for my collage interventions. Kingston, New York, rare book dealer Half Moon Books described the catalog: “Blue matt art paper wrappers, with title stamped in black on cover, saddle bound, no dust jacket as issued. Photographs by William Eggleston. Essays by Jane Livingston and Lloyd Fonvielle. Includes an exhibition checklist, map showing where the photographs were taken, biography, bibliography and exhibition history. Designed by Katy Homans. Unpaginated (16 pp.), with three tipped-in four-color plates by Acme Printing Company, Inc., Medford, Connecticut. 8 x 11 inches. This first edition was limited to 2,000 copies. Published on the occasion of the 1977 exhibition ‘Election Eve’ at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Out of print.” Had I known before I started collaging that the catalog was selling on the secondary market for over $250, would I have been as enthusiastic to cut into it? Maybe, but I’d like to think not.   

I don’t know exactly how Eggleston’s little blue book ended up in Kolaj Institute’s materials but, as these things do, it jumped out to me as special when I saw it. The blue matte cover felt extra soft and the printed photographs shine on the page. Eggleston excelled at bringing emotional resonance to the banal. Great art can get us excited and curious about the most mundane things. I began to intervene on the photographs, employing them as backgrounds to two bit creations of abstract traveling vessels. I imagined myself on Eggleston’s road trip, winding through peanut fields near Friendship or stopping at the Snak Shak in Motezuma. I thought about how we share a deep love and affection for the American South and a desire to bring respect to the door step of people often denied it. Eggleston tells us that we can make art of the simplest things, “that nothing was more important or less important.” In making these works, I stitch myself into that history and remind myself to carry it forward.

A small series, “After Eggleston”, led to a more ambitious project of collage intervention with much different aims. The “Fucking Picasso” project intervenes on 141 plates published in the 1969 book, Picasso’s Private Drawings from the Artist’s Personal Collection, as a way of interrogating the outsized cultural real estate dominated by the artist. But more on that after I complete the project.