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However comfortably Eggleston may be placed within the documentary tradition of postwar photography, both the matter of his influence and his own voluminous, ongoing production are far more complicated than referencing such a tidy and direct lineage might imply. His work raises various questions: Is Eggleston more an inheritor of Walker Evans or the grandfather of Andreas Gursky? Is his cool, nonjudgmental approach part of a longstanding modernist commitment to recording the everyday or an exactingly rendered postmodernism before the fact? Is Eggleston’s evasion of discourse surrounding the work old-fashioned and genteel or rather timely and fashionable?

In favor of scrutinizing the taciturn man who made the inscrutable art, these questions are not directly addressed in the current films. Context is everything when banking on the artist as “personality.” Gerard and Laty are most successful at conveying the importance of Eggleston as a product of Memphis, the home of blues, rockabilly, and, later, such musical individualists as Alex Chilton and Tav Falco. One of the most charming bits of By the Ways features Falco, leader of the band Panther Burns, coiffed with a flowing black pompadour and sporting a pencil-thin moustache, expounding on the relative perfection of Eggleston’s contact sheets and the lingering influence of Henri Cartier-Bresson.

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Arguably the most indelible of Eggleston’s photographic achievements is the volume William Eggleston’s Guide (1976), forty-eight photos that serve to collate an idiosyncratic vision, marked by its concise and insistent clarity. Guide accompanied the photographer’s now-benchmark and then-controversial solo exhibition of color photographs, a rarity at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City and a major arbiter of taste in the narrow sliver that is/was the world of fine art photography. Photographer and critic Mark Power once succinctly remarked that it was one of the few photography books that “reads like a novel.” (1)

John Szarkowski, then-director of the photography department at MoMA, and curator of the exhibition, wrote a penetrating and insightful analysis of Eggleston’s work for the introduction:

These pictures are fascinating partly because they contradict our
expectations. We have been told so often of the bland synthetic
smoothness of exemplary American life, of its comfortable, vacant
insentience, its extruded, stamped, and molded sameness, in a word its
irredeemable dullness, that we have come half to believe it, and thus
are startled and perhaps exhilarated to see these pictures of
prototypically normal types on their familiar ground … who seem to
live surrounded by spirits, not all of them benign. (2)
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Although Szarkowski is entirely correct in his alignment of that particular body of work with “ordinary” subjects, Eggleston has also committed a great and eclectic variety of material to film, whether on movie sets, in Elvis Presley’s home, in nightclubs, or while abroad. Eggleston, a specialist in terse replies to interviewers, has also generated many memorable dicta such as his notion of The Democratic Forest (the title of the long-awaited 1989 sequel to Guide), that no image is of estimably greater significance than another, or his methodology of taking “only one picture of only one thing.” He has also disdained the reading of his work as deriving from the “snapshot” with the retort: “They want something-obvious. The blindness is apparent when someone lets slip the word ’snapshot.’ Ignorance can always be covered by ’snapshot.’ The word has never had any meaning. I am at war with the obvious.” (3)