Finding Myself in a Photograph: Part One
by William Boling
“I photograph to find out what something will look like photographed.” Garry Winogrand
Like Garry was, I am a card carrying member of the ‘picture generation’. I am insatiable. I cut my picture teeth very young. I was suckling at the black and white glow of a TV screen set inside a big boxy blond Magnavox. It was a large piece of furniture set in the corner of our living room. It was the TV equivalent of a big fin Cadillac. As I recall it stood on George Jetson style legs with little bronze caps. Ready for take-off or landing which ever might be needed. It was the early 60s and I was still in grade school but old enough to stay up late and watch Johnny Carson. Sitting cross-legged in cold light I saw Jack Ruby shoot Lee Harvey Oswald, ‘live’, in that box. And I saw the caisson drawn by a team of white horses with President Kennedy’s flag-draped remains go past along with the solo black caisson horse with the President’s boots lodged backwards in the stirrups. I don’t remember the words that must have been spoken but I knew the pictures — coffin, flag, horse with empty boots — and I took the meaning. What happened in that light box was real to me. It was the same screen that brought me Popeye and Leave it to Beaver and of course I loved it. I was a free and easy grazer of pictures from the start.
My world has always been fed, mediated and re-mediated to me through pictures. Somewhere along the way I fell in love with photographs too. We had the weekly mags — Life, Time and National Geographic — around the house and that was interesting, but photographic magic happened elsewhere for me. It was in the silver gelatin prints in the shoeboxes, hat boxes and albums that my Grandparents and Mom and Dad kept around. I was a frequent miner in all the closets and chests that held these treasures. It was only these pictures that could stand up to, even surpass, the magic of the Magnavox glow. I didn’t know then, and still don’t exactly, the precise alchemy of a photograph that you hold in your hand. But, I suspect it is a kind of witching rod that takes us on a journey into ourselves. I always felt Garry’s quote about photographing to ‘see how something looks photographed’ was brilliant but was only half the photograph story. That only answers why we take a photograph. But, why do we look at photographs?
I recently expanded Garry’s idea and used it in my Instagram profile @wboling to try and explain what I think I’m doing on Instagram. “We take pictures to see how things look photographed, but we look at photographs to see, as if in a mirror, what it is of us we find there.” My thought is that looking into a photograph we find ourselves there individually but also collectively. Gazing at a photograph we do more than simply orient and ‘find ourselves’ of course. But, spelunking soul is a primary part of the experience — we are channeling what it is to be human, to be alive, to be here, to be us — this is evidence — what does it show? This leads me to the photograph you see here by William Eggleston.
I came fully alive to photography as a medium for art in 1992 as a result of an encounter with Jane Jackson. She had just founded a new photography gallery in Atlanta — Jackson Fine Art. (It is still my favorite gallery — go there if you’re in ATL). I went in not knowing what to expect. We looked and talked and eventually Jane brought out for me the large portfolio “William Eggleston’s Graceland”. We opened the big clam-shell box and together we pored over the 11 dye-transfer photographs of Elvis’ Graceland that make up one of the great art documents of the 20th century. I was smitten. In the years following I absorbed color photography from every direction. The work of Shore, Sternfeld, Struth were very important to me, but the fascination, bordering on hypnotic, continued to be centered for me most powerfully around Eggleston’s work. I would still see Eggleson’s prints occasionally, usually framed and on the wall. But, mostly I saw his work through books, that were with increasing frequency being released in the 90s. I bought them all. Then later of course, his work in book form came by avalanche until even I could no longer keep pace.
At some point in the 90s I stumbled upon the beautiful little exhibition catalog for “Election Eve” that the Corcoran Gallery of Art had published for its exhibition of the same 1976 project Eggleston had undertaken in the months leading up to the election of Jimmy Carter in 1976. There had been an over-run of catalogs and each was offered by Photo-eye for $8. (I should have bought a hundred of them.) The publication itself is still by far my favorite small art show catalog. It is beautiful in every respect. But, what took my breath away when I opened it was the tipped-in photo you see here of the Snak Shak from Montezuma, Georgia — a small hamlet, just down the road from Jimmy Carter’s home town of Plains. In the next part of this essay I want to explore what it is about this image in particular that grips me so and has done, relentlessly, for twenty years.
