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The last gallery exhibition I saw in 2022 stunned me.
But it could almost be a name for the United States, both then and today.
The Outlands isan odyssey of driving and stopping, waiting and looking.
Eggleston, 83, has been famous for almost a half-century.
His path hasnt been easy.
Eggleston was born rich in Memphis.
I saw him when I gave a lecture there in the 1990s.
As I started speaking, a couple danced in front of the stage and crashed into the band pit.
A local peered down and said, Hello, Bill.
Eggleston and his wife, Rosa, got up and walked away.
No one batted an eye.
The impression terrified me.
I saw a city forced to make peace with this madman seer.
He has beendescribedas smelling like bourbon and body lotion.
In fact, he brought high artintopopular culture and changed both.
His supersaturated colors intensify and distort the usual expectations of color photography.
Theres nothing pastoral or sentimental about these pictures, which he calls his little paintings.
Once when sitting with his hero, Henri Cartier-Bresson, the Frenchman opined that color is bullshit.
Egglestongot upand went to another table.
He says hes at war with the obvious.
And like those meticulously depicted works, Egglestons pictures go beyond subject matter and take on an allegorical weight.
Theres a lot of humanity in these images.
The late Peter Schjeldahl called him a blues photographer.
The cover of the catalogue pictures a two-tone Oldsmobile station wagon with Tennessee plates parked on a dirt road.
Three of its doors are open.
A rag on a nearby barbed-wire fence flutters.
As two chickens look on, the ruby-red slipper-shoe of a woman (Rosa) steps out the door.
Theres a witchy imperiousness to this shoe on earth.
Storm clouds fill the sky.
The scenery Eggleston depicts isnt backdrop.
Driving was seeing without thinking, looking as a mindless present.
Passive, a kind of narcotic.
Egglestons scenery clutches you in its talons.
Spirits seem to fill the air of this America.
The people in these photos look askance at one another.
The Outlandsis ethnographic this way, pictures of socio-political and religious tribes.
Every group is almost a closed society.
His space is one of suspicion, surveillance, paranoia.
Norms and mores are silently enforced.
See the many signs saying No:No parking, no smoking, no loitering.
You dont cross lines here.
We see moral decay brought on by racism, corruption, resentment.
Masochism and viciousness, insidious demons, tyrannical forces that make people unwilling to change.
For decades we have told ourselves that these forces were dying.
What makes The Outlandsso extraordinary is that it shows that none of that died.
We also told ourselves that this was a disease of the South.
In fact, the disease was everywhere.
Eggleston makes you see that all space is social space, political space.
A picture of a country post office shows an American flag blowing in the breeze.
It looks like summer.
The Zip Code is 39110, placing it just north of Jackson, Mississippi.
An I Want You Uncle Sam recruiting poster is in the window.
When these pictures were being made, Richard Nixon knew the Vietnam War was lost.
Delaying the end of the war, he campaigned on peace with honor.
It was all a lie.
A place where the guilty still walk free.
A place we all know now.
One picture is of an overgrown tree along a puddly, potholed dirt road.
Theres a cardboard poster on it that reads Hutchinson for Sheriff.
Another image gives us a boarded-up building with a sign that reads Elect Skillman Prosecuting Attorney.
Both posters include photos of the candidate to let voters know that each is white.
A sign on a station wagon says Register Communists Not Our Firearms.
There are warnings everywhere.
Look at the bullet holes in truck windows and on signs.
Egglestons pictures are clairvoyant.
We see people seething with impotent rigidity.
