Gerry Winagrand, American, 1928-1984, Cape Kennedy, Florida, (Apollo 11 Moon Shot), 1969, Gelatin silver print, 28.0 x 35.4 cm, Gift of Elizabeth and Frederick Myers, 1983.1519, © the Estate of Garry Winogrand, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.

Brad Richman, American, born 1971, Chicago, Illinois, June 8, 1997, Gelatin silver print, 37.2 x 47.1 cm (image); 40.5 x 50.4 cm (support), Restricted gift of John A. Bross, 1999.316, © Brad Richman, Courtesy Lee Marks Fine Art.

Martin Parr, English, born 1952, Fashion Magazine: Fashion Shoot, New York, 1999, Chromogenic print mounted to aluminum, 125.4 x 103.2 cm (framed), The Art Institute of Chicago, David C. and Sarajean Ruttenberg Arts Foundation Purchase Fund, 2006.190, © Martin Parr/Magnum, courtesy Stephen Daiter Gallery.

Walker Evans, American, 1903-1975, Penny Picture Display, Savannah, 1936, Gelatin silver print, 21.6 x 17.7 cm, The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Mrs. James Ward Thorne, 1962.148, Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Art Institute of Chicago
111 South Michigan Avenue
312-443-3600
Chicago
Galleries 1 and 2
In the Vernacular
February 6-May 31, 2010

Serving as both practical resource and creative conduit, photography possesses a unique elasticity that makes it a rich medium for artistic scrutiny. Photographs are not limited solely to aesthetic expression, social documentation, or the capture of personal memories. By challenging the uses and restrictions typically imposed on photographs, artists tap into photography's boundless potential for visual and critical undertakings. Working across the categories of "high" and "low" art enable artists to mine photography's vast emotional and intellectual impact, a range that reaches desire and nostalgia, fear and curiosity.

For at least a century, vernacular photographs — those ordinary, amateur or professional, "everyday" pictures — both challenged and inspired fine-art photography. In the Vernacular brings together images by artists who — through their choice of content, process, aesthetic, and means of distribution — blur or erase the boundaries that seem to separate fine art from the commonplace. In the Vernacular features more than 100 images culled from the museum's permanent collection. Twenty new acquisitions made by the Department of Photography — including works by Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Richard Misrach, and Andy Warhol — are included in the show. Many of these images are familiar and universal: snapshots, crime-scene photos, advertising images, family pictures, travel albums, and pin-up posters.

In their exploration of vernacular photography — be it the amateur vernacular of snapshots, the professional vernacular of studio practice, or the opportunistic vernacular of photojournalism — artists endow their work with a sense of authenticity and refinement, portraying accessible and familiar themes with subjects derived from everyday experience. Photographers who earn a living through photojournalism, editorial, fashion, or commercial work manage to practice in both realms, with some offering family snapshots in their "official" work. Indeed, the history of photography is filled with artists challenging the fine art world's pretension and artifice through the photograph's multiple uses.

In the Vernacular presents the work of artists who strategically use the forms of everyday photography as a source of inspiration, consciously interrogating the medium and the complexity of its significance. The exhibition includes prime examples of this photographic style by Walker Evans, Andy Warhol, Lee Friedlander, Cindy Sherman, Martin Parr, Nikki S. Lee, and others, inviting viewers to reevaluate the impact, value, and status of the photographs we encounter in our daily lives.

Intimate and distant, familiar and strange, these images ask the viewer to consider how photographs convey meaning, how their presentation — whether on the walls of a museum, the pages of a magazine, the folds of a cabinet file, or the center of a living room mantel — reflects or distorts reality. While the exhibition presents these works in groups according to the various forms of vernacular photography they address, their porous arrangement suggests a common relationship to one or more vernaculars without being either exhaustive or conclusive.

In the Vernacular is organized by the Art Institute of Chicago and is curated by Gregory Harris, curatorial adjunct, the Department of Photography.

Andy Warhol, American, 1928-1987, Shriver, Maria, 1986, Instant photograph, color, 10.8 x 8.6 cm, The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, 2008.244, Courtesy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

William Eggleston, Untitled, 1975, Dye transfer print, 16 x 20", Cheim & Read, New York, © Eggleston Artistic Trust.

William Eggleston, Untitled, c.1971-73, from Troubled Waters, 1980, Dye transfer print, 16 x 20, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; museum purchase with the aid of funds from the National Endowment for the Arts, Washington, D.C., a federal agency, and the Polaroid Foundation, © Eggleston Artistic Trust.

William Eggleston, Untitled (St. Simons Island, Georgia), 1978 from Morals of Vision, 1978, Dye transfer print, 15-3/4 x 19-15/16", Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Gift of Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz 94.113, © Eggleston Artistic Trust.

William Eggleston, Untitled, 1965-68 and 1972-74, from Los Alamos, 2003, Dye transfer print, 12 x 17-3/4", Private collection, © Eggleston Artistic Trust.

William Eggleston, Untitled, 1965-68 and 1972-74, from Los Alamos, 2003, Dye transfer print, 17-¾ x 12, Private collection, © Eggleston Artistic Trust.

William Eggleston, Morton, Mississippi, c. 1969-70, from William Eggleston’s Guide, 1976, Dye transfer print, 20-9/16 x 13-3/8", Niedersächsische Sparkassenstiftung, Hannover, © Eggleston Artistic Trust.

William Eggleston, Untitled, 1965-68 and 1972-74, from Los Alamos, 2003, Dye transfer print, 17-¾ x 12", Private collection, © Eggleston Artistic Trust.

Art Institute of Chicago
Art Institute of Chicago
111 South Michigan Avenue
312-443-3600
Chicago
Modern Wing
Abbott Galleries
(G182, G184) and
Carolyn S. and Matthew Bucksbaum Gallery (G188)
William Eggleston: Democratic Camera, Photographs and Video, 1961-2008
February 27-May 23, 2010

Nearly 50 years of extraordinary image-making by the photographer William Eggleston will be presented in a major retrospective, William Eggleston: Democratic Camera — Photographs and Video, 1961-2008. Organized by the Whitney in association with Haus der Kunst, Munich, the exhibition is the most comprehensive yet devoted to Eggleston in this country.

William Eggleston: Democratic Camera traces the artist’s evolution from the beginnings of his career some 50 years ago to the present day, and includes more than 150 photographs, some never-before-exhibited, as well as the artist’s rarely screened video diary of his legendary nocturnal wanderings, Stranded in Canton. A key figure in American photography, Eggleston, who was born in 1939 in Memphis, is credited with almost single-handedly ushering in the era of color photography. The psychological intensity of the saturated color in Eggleston’s pictures has had an enormous impact on the entire field of photography; as an influence, Eggleston has cited the Technicolor technique in the films of Alfred Hitchcock.

Elisabeth Sussman notes, “Eggleston’s sense of color and composition is impeccable. His work is marked by a deep concern with equal consideration and evenhanded treatment of all his subjects. He knows and loves his terrain: the new supermarkets, sidewalks, driveways, patios, shiny cars, dinner settings, gas stations, and houses of the middle class, the interiors of elegant old Southern homes, the bars and their habitués. He captures landscape and architecture in unexpected ways — for instance his famous view upwards to the ceiling in a red room, or the empty space of a green tiled bathroom. And, importantly, Eggleston, though not a portraitist in a traditional sense, has a cool, but not uncomplicated view of the people he often photographs in these environments.”

The show begins with Eggleston’s early black-and-white photographs and covers his groundbreaking shift to color and his dye transfer work of the early 1970s. Highlights from the last 20 years include selections from the Graceland series and The Democratic Forest, Eggleston’s anthology of the quotidian. An unparalleled chronicler of the American South, Eggleston has produced a veritable encyclopedia of the Southern vernacular. His focus has been primarily upon his native locales of Memphis, New Orleans, and the Mississippi River Delta, although his commissioned projects have taken him all over the world.

In the mid-1970s, Eggleston became famous as a photographer. His color photographs, printed in the rich dye transfer medium, were recognized by The Museum of Modern Art’s curator John Szarkowski, who showed them in 1976 in a historic and controversial exhibition at the museum. With this one-person show and the accompanying book, William Eggleston’s Guide, Eggleston emerged as the first color photographer of note in America, the first to make color an issue in an art photography context.

Eggleston’s trademark photograph is snapshot-like. It is an intuitive response to a fleeting configuration of elements in the tradition of Henri Cartier-Bresson, whom he greatly admired and in whose credo of The Decisive Moment he has found a counterpart to his own life’s work. As co-curator Thomas Weski writes in the exhibition catalogue, “In many of his early pictures, the observer gets the feeling that Eggleston composed the photograph only roughly and accepted everything that fell within the established frame. This approach led to prints that integrated the unpredictable into the picture and thus accepted the stroke of chance. For Eggleston, everything in front of the camera was basically worthy of a picture.”

The exhibition includes Eggleston’s cult video work, Stranded in Canton. Eggleston and a friend had begun using film to document Fred McDowell, a well-known Delta blues musician, but they ultimately abandoned the film project. Eggleston later acquired a video camera and began using video to shoot in bars and in people's homes; sometimes he shot monologues of friends delivered for his video camera, most often at night. The result, “Stranded in Canton,” recently rediscovered and re-edited, is a portrait of a woozy subculture that adds dimension and texture to the world of Eggleston’s color photographs. As Sussman writes, “Though the epic, multi-episodic project Stranded in Canton cannot be described as a nocturnal work in its entirety, its mood is nonetheless established by the fact that many episodes were shot late at night. It is thus in contrast to the well-known color work, where the powers of color and light are absolutely keyed to Eggleston’s daytime vision. In his video work, the photographer was able to give visual shape to a demimonde in which he was both participant and observer.”

The exhibition is accompanied by a full-color catalogue that provides new insight into the ways in which Eggleston’s photography has influenced generations of American artists, filmmakers, writers, and public perceptions of art. It includes essays by co-curators Elisabeth Sussman and Thomas Weski; Whitney Chief Curator and Associate Director of Programs Donna De Salvo; Senior Curatorial Assistant Tina Kukielski; and noted American music journalist Stanley Booth. The publication includes an illustrated chronology, checklist of the exhibition, list of publications, selected exhibition history, selected bibliography, and index. It is co-distributed by Yale University Press.

William Eggleston: Democratic Camera, Photographs and Video, 1961-2008 is organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, in association with Haus der Kunst in Munich. The exhibition is co-curated by Elisabeth Sussman, curator and Sondra Gilman Curator of Photography at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and Thomas Weski, former deputy director of Haus der Kunst in Munich, Germany, now professor of the study of curatorial cultures at the Academy of Visual Arts, Leipzig. The Chicago presentation of William Eggleston: Democratic Camera, Photographs and Video, 1961-2008 is curated by Katherine Bussard, associate curator of photography, the Art Institute of Chicago.

Elisabeth Sussman, Whitney curator and the Museum’s Sondra Gilman Curator of
Photography, recently curated the Whitney’s acclaimed exhibition Gordon Matta-Clark: You Are the Measure. Her latest photography project was the celebrated 2003-04 Diane Arbus: Revelations, the first retrospective of this controversial and highly influential photographer since 1972; it opened at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), then traveled to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and elsewhere in the U.S. and abroad, including the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. She is currently organizing a Whitney exhibition on Paul Thek.

Thomas Weski is deputy director of the Haus der Kunst, Munich. As chief curator there from 2003 to 2008, his exhibitions included Andreas Gursky (2007); Click Doubleclick — The Documentary Factor (2006, in cooperation with the Palais des Beaux Arts, Brussels); and Robert Adams: Turning Back, which received the 2005 Deutsche Börse Award. Formerly, Weski was chief curator at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, where he was curator of the traveling exhibition William Eggleston: Los Alamos (2003); co-curator with Emma Dexter of Cruel and Tender: The Real in the Twentieth-Century Photograph (2003, co-organized with Tate Modern, London); and co-curator with Heinz Liesbrock of How You Look at It: Photographs of the Twentieth Century (2000).