William Eggleston may well be credited with legitimizing color photography in the eyes of the art world, but he by no means feared the monochromatic. Many of the most gripping images in Twin Palms Publishers' new monograph of Eggleston's work, titled simply 5x7, are black-and-white shots taken in the Memphis bars and clubs the photographer frequented while living in Tennessee in the early 1970s. The era and location can be pinpointed—long manes on the good ol' boys, wide lapels, bell bottoms—but the photos stubbornly maintain their timelessness due mainly to the expressions captured on the subjects' faces. Taken after minimal preparation with a large format 5x7 camera and flash in an otherwise pitch-black room, Eggleston managed to catch people in that indefinable middle ground between the candid and the posed. An essay in 5x7by Michael Almereyda, director of the 2005 biographical documentary, William Eggleston in the Real World, points out that "[the photographs'] subjects may be drunk, stoned, or otherwise distracted, but they are convincingly caught in the act of being themselves."
However self-conscious those people might have been, the photos also gracefully reveal the idiosyncrasies that Eggleston highlighted in his later, celebrated color landscape photos. Dilapidation, resignation, and struggle can evidently be just as vividly portrayed in the faces and postures of nameless individuals as by the sweeping shots of Americana for which Eggleston is most famous. In fact, several early color shots of both types, portraits and streetscapes, are included here—precursors to the later work.
The photographs in 5x7, originally conceived as companion pieces to his video, Stranded in Canton, "stayed on ice," as Eggleston put it, and most remained unpublished and forgotten for more than 30 years. Limited to 4,000 hardbound copies and printed on a scale large enough to do justice to these exquisitely detailed images, 5x7 offers evidence, again, of our collective, distinctive humanity brought to light by the craft and artistry of a master.
