Now 70 years old, William Eggleston is one of the most enduringly fashionable figures in rock ’n’ roll, despite never releasing a note of recorded music.
With his lurid snapshots of ordinary scenes shot around his hometown of Memphis and the Mississippi Delta, Eggleston is mostly known as the photographer who made color photography a respectable art form.
Using a dye process that rendered the hues of his work unusually sharp and bright, Eggleston favored ordinary subjects such as the neon isle of a supermarket, a tricycle framed against a banal suburban backdrop or a man sitting forlornly on the edge of a hotel bed.
Dismissed by art critics early in his career, he has since become one of the most influential photographers of the 20th century. An exhibition of his work at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City drew 120,000 viewers last year, prompting the institution to acquire more of Eggleston’s work for its permanent collection.
Less talked about, however, are the numerous Eggleston photographs that have enjoyed second lives as album covers.
Even before the 1976 show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City brought him national attention, Eggleston’s photograph of a red ceiling with a naked light bulb in the middle of it became the cover art for the second album by power pop progenitors Big Star. Like Eggleston, Big Star was from Memphis and eventually enjoyed artistic influence and critical acclaim after originally being ignored.
Big Star’s Alex Chilton also used an Eggleston photograph of a dozen dolls lined across the grill of a baby blue Cadillac for his 1979 solo album “Like Flies on Sherbert.”
The best-selling album to feature an Eggleston photograph is probably the emo-rock band Jimmy Eat World’s platinum-selling 2001 album “Bleed American,” later re-named “Jimmy Eat World” after the terrorist attacks of 9-11. “Bleed American’s” cover is a cropped version of the Eggleston photo “Memphis, Tennessee 1968,” which features an old-fashioned cigarette machine with a number of trophies arranged on top of it.
In January this year the evergreen Austin rock band Spoon released its seventh album, “Transference,” with a beautiful Eggleston photo taken in 1970 Mississippi of a young man. In the photo, the man is dressed in dark jeans and a khaki jacket, slouched with his hands behind his head in a Victorian hard-backed chair in the middle of a green, formal living room.
Other artists who have used Eggleston photos for their album covers include Primal Scream, the ’80s paisley underground band Green on Red, the Silver Jews and harpist and current indie darling Joanna Newsom. David Byrne of the Talking Heads and Cat Power have also licensed Eggleston’s work, and the photographer even makes a cameo in Cat Power’s 2006 music video “Lived in Bars.”
Perhaps the reason Eggleston’s photos work so well as album covers is the unusual ordinariness of his subject matter. His subject of seemingly unremarkable Americana is imminently transplantable.
Furthermore, Eggleston’s gift for framing everyday moments in a way that makes the viewer take notice of an object or person she might have otherwise ignored is probably appealing to musicians who have a similar goal. Don’t we listen to music for its ability to lend our mostly boring lives a little poignancy?
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Iconic photographer’s work lives on CDs
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