One of the best things about my trip to Los Angeles was getting to see the big William Eggleston retrospective at LACMA (ironically, I was in LA when it was on at the Whitney in 2008). It was a show in which I found a number of his photographs peculiarly familiar even if I hadn't consciously seen them before: he's a photographer by whom I've been very influenced, even though I don't know if I would have recognized this fact loudly and consciously without seeing the exhibition. But his stress on the ordinary - the "democratic camera" of the exhibition's title - and his love of slightly over-saturated color (pre-digital, he produced this through the dye transfer process, which allowed him to isolated and concentrate colors in his images) - both feed into my own work all the time.
I hadn't known his freezer interior, with its chilly blues and rather unhealthy yellows, but couldn't wait to get home and imitate it. I was rather surprised to open the freezer door and find how healthy it looked, by comparison - the only prepared foods in here are pre-packed bags of Whole Foods spinach, which hardly count, and some Smart Water, which is probably me turning a marketing rip-off into something that I can pop into an insulated bag when next travelling long distance in the car. There's a slight disappointment in this, in that there's limited documentary value. One of the things that I found myself reflecting on at the exhibition was the passage of time that ensures that the strictly contemporary - the food packets and the advertisements, the cars and the hairstyles - date and become documentary history, so that the images take on a patina of nostalgia that they rarely had initially. I say "rarely" cautiously, though, because Eggleston was, and is, a self-conscious recorder of the south, and of small town diners and gas stations - exactly the kind of locations that have individual character, and the passing of which is easy to lament even before they are actually closed and derelict.
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