The New York Review of Books: Eggleston’s Empty America

Many of William Eggleston’s great photographs make a point of seeming to show nothing at all. Consider The Democratic Forest, a new book published in conjunction with an exhibition at the David Zwirner Gallery, including selections from 1983 to 1988 that convey quiet and sparse scenes of America (and not to be confused with his 1989 album of the same title). In his remarkable picture of a laundry room, for example, the white appliances sit squarely at angles to themselves, defining the neat and inglorious space in a harmony of edges. A vacuum cleaner and chair pose side by side, and a yellow laundry basket sits atop one of the machines, just to one side of a water heater in the corner, all of them like the attributes of a saint who forgot to appear in her own altarpiece. [...]

Eggleston’s laundry room, by contrast, avoids the feeling of existential crisis. Instead the beauty of the scene derives from the simple geometries of a feminine space, a domestic one, not unlike some of the other subjects in this book (Eudora Welty’s simple curtained kitchen window, for example). And those beauties, allowed to remain unsung, begin to echo with their own emptiness. [...]

But Eggleston’s emptiness has other forms. Take his great photograph of the vacant concession stand. Painted pink with a yellow interior, the stand is flanked by matching plastic garbage cans and set back on cement painted in a four-square pattern of pale blue and yellow. The solemnity of this frivolous structure! It reminds me strangely of the villa of Pontius Pilate at background left in Piero della Francesca’s Flagellation of Christ, painted in the 1450s. The architecture of Pilate’s home, with its mathematical recession of floor and ceiling, is no more stately than Eggleston’s vacant refreshment booth. The dignity of Eggleston’s scene is enough to make one think of Piero having been commissioned to paint an altarpiece for an amusement park, only to have abandoned his would-be Madonna of the Sno-Cone Stand because of lack of payment, or a sudden war or plague, the painting remaining forever after with only the architecture and not the figures finished.

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