5x7
by William Eggleston

I've come late to William Eggleston. He is one of the first modern color art photographers. I missed him in the 1970s but better late then never. My local library has two other Eggleston books I've recommended: William Eggleston and William Eggleston, 2 1/4. While most of his work is in 35mm, for a brief time he worked with a 5x7 view camera. This is a new book with those images. A lot of the black and white was shot in a bar with open flash. Amazing. You can do that with a 5x7? I was most interested in this book since I have a 5x7. There are more possibilites than I thought. Here is a review with some pictures.

William Eggleston’s 5×7

After roaming around San Francisco one day last year, photographing with a friend, we went to see a one-time-only screening of William Eggleston’s “Stranded in Canton“. It was the kind of experience that leaves you scratching your head, in the best possible way. Eggleston’s experiment (filmed on a PortaPak in 1973) was so ahead of its time it almost didn’t exist. Fittingly, the film’s settled into memory as more of a hazy dream than a movie. There’s no story, no plot, no traditional anything - but it’s loaded with characters: real people playing themselves, as they might have, drunk and singing while an observant friend glided around them with an infrared video camera in 1973. What I didn’t know was that Eggleston was making portraits with a 5×7 view camera around the same time, with help from one of his Canton friends on strobe patrol. Beautifully printed in “5×7” from Twin Palms Publishing, the 57 plates in the book speak distinctly where Canton mostly mumbles.

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5X7
William Eggleston

William Eggleston’s latest monograph features photographs taken during the early 1970s using a large format 5x7 camera. While the book includes imagery typical of the Eggleston oeuvre– streetscapes, parked automobiles, portraits of the strange and disenfranchised–the book also offers never-before-published photographs taken in the nightclubs Eggleston used to frequent.

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Behind the Photograph

Smithsonian.com has just posted Emily Yellin’s article about the true story behind this William Eggleston photograph. There are often interesting stories behind fine art photographs, but artists sometimes choose to let photographs (and viewers’ personal interpretations of photographs) tell their own stories. I personally feel this is one of the most beautiful parts of the experience of art. Yellin grew up in Memphis, and interviewed Eggleston and the two women in this photograph. It is an interesting look at the story behind the photograph. As many of you know, I lived in Memphis and worked with Eggleston for a few years. During that time, I heard many interesting stories about the circumstances behind photographs that I love.

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They Needed to Talk
And family friend William Eggleston, his camera at his side, felt compelled to shoot
By Emily Yellin

The details are a bit sketchy now, but everyone agrees the picture was taken in Memphis, Tennessee, on a late summer night in 1973. Karen Chatham, the young woman in blue, recalls that she had been out drinking when she met up with Lesa Aldridge, the woman in red. Lesa didn't drink at the time, but both were 18, the legal age then. As the bars closed at 3 a.m., the two followed some other revelers to a friend's house nearby. In the mix was a 30-something man who had been taking pictures all night. "I always thought of Bill as just like us," Karen says today, "until years later, when I realized that he was famous."

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