Commonplace Masterpieces 5 comments

By A.G. Harmon

A tricycle on a neighborhood sidewalk in Memphis, 1970: the seat, body, and fenders are a space-metal blue—the post and handlebars, a refrigerator white, except for two bright red hand grips. A caustic layer of hard rust cuts deep into the metal from the wear of countless rainstorms. But above all, three thick black tires with white metal spokes anchor the frame to the sidewalk, and hold within them the pent fury of a mad, frenzied speed that demands estimation—claims place and respect.

The walk the wheels sit upon is a seamless gray; the short, dead grass, leafless trees, and flat lightless sky testify to winter. Across the street sit two small ranch houses; this is the suburbia of American lore, at the height of its prime.

And all is captured in a photograph, taken while the photographer lies flat on his stomach, so that the tricycle in the foreground looms above all else, an unlikely monument of time and memory.

Why this picture, taken by master photographer William Eggleston, almost forty years ago now, should stop me cold and make me stare the way it does is somewhat understandable, somewhat not. Though I had no such velocipede as a child, at least not to my recollection, everything about the scene is fraught with my past. Memory is both “jubilee and knell” said Emily Dickinson, and the opposing impulses catch me hard when I see such scenes represented. I suspect this is so for everyone, though with different catalysts and other familiars.

But when captured on film, there is a jarring recognition unique to the photographic medium, an inordinate power that sets off an atavistic cataract.

Perhaps that is because the most talented in the field know how to make metaphors out of the material world. Other artists must craft their suggestions with images formed from words or paint, music or stone. In contrast, the material of the photographer’s correlatives is direct, and does not employ another communicative vehicle to obtain its objective. The poet must manipulate words to make us see concrete images, but the photographer uses the raw stuff of the known world to do this in reverse. The more tactile arts come close—sculpture, for example—but they are representative, mediated in a way that photography is not.

A couple of American masters in the genre, Eggleston and his contemporary, William Christenberry (see Image #35), are the best exemplars of what the medium can achieve. One approach is for the photographer to mount things, arrange them so that they strike the eye.

Eggleston famously captured two college-age girls, undoubtedly at a party: one reclining mournfully on a sofa, the other sitting, leaning in, her hair cascading across her neck. The image is like a pre-Raphaelite’s dream of a dying Desdemona and a supplicant Emilia—or the Virgin Mary and an attendant Magdalene. The girls’ fresh beauty is an oxymoron of sad energy.

Another approach is for the artist to find things that present themselves, as though discovering some ignored wonderwork that the callous race cannot bother itself to notice: a faded blue car at the side of the street, surrounded by a bouquet of trash that eerily echoes and compliments its color; a 1965 bag boy, in his white shirt and black tie, rolling the shopping buggies back to the grocery store. His blonde pompadour is brylcreemed, and the late day sun lights him majestically; his profile might have been captured on a coin. And even the inside of an undefrosted freezer, accidentally blooming with the gently rimed pastels of ice cream containers and frozen food boxes. There is a certain spontaneous, democratic beauty to all of this—as though the world has volunteered a quiet kindness.

Because these men capture a time and place that I know makes their work appeal to me particularly; there is sentiment in this, no doubt. But I believe there is more too: a reminder of nature’s immediacy, and of the ordinary world’s inward fire. A rumor that theophanies line the interstate, and that we are prone to walk by altars and fall asleep before reliquaries.

To say this is to risk romance, but if nature is fallen, just as man is—then why should it not, at times, rise up to its potential, give flashes of its splendor—just as men can do when they are heroic or merciful? Maybe when we pause at such scenes, we are recalling some testament to an immortal piece of the human puzzle, whispering that what we saw once, we could yet see again.