Alfred Barr once observed that Eggleston’s compositions seemed to radiate from a central, circular core. In response, Eggleston claimed that the pictures were meant to mimic the Confederate flag–a comment for which he was heavily censured. At another time, Eggleston said
“Sometimes I like the idea of making a picture that does not look like a human picture. Humans make pictures which tend to be about five feet above the ground looking out horizontally.”*
The central orientation described by Barr figures into Eggleston’s Untitled (Los Angeles), along with a take on the horizontality of the “human picture.” The composition uses a variation of a radiating one point perspective, which does not give the illusion of a perfect vanishing point as it is supposed to, but rather bends distortedly from the back of the truck’s sidemirror: an imperfect vision on the opposite (side) of a mirror. This reflected image–horizontally oriented and about five feet off the ground–is an approximation of the “human picture,” but Eggleston complicates it by nesting within the larger vertical of the photograph itself. It is almost as if the “human picture” has become a subject of the work itself.
Untitled (Los Angeles) is one of four prints selected for LACMA’s art editions program on Paddle8. Read about the other editions artists David Salle and Barbara Kruger.
See William Eggleston’s Dossier from our earlier exhibition Stuff: Still Life Photography
* Mark Holborn. “Introduction.” Ancient and Modern. New York: Random House, 1992. 23-24.