Listening for Eggleston

A profile of the pioneering artist and his passion for music.

By John Jeremiah Sullivan

William Eggleston at his Bösendorfer piano, Memphis, 2016. Photograph by Stefan Ruiz

I remember the first William Eggleston photograph I ever saw, or the first that I knew was his, that it had been made by someone called “William Eggleston”—his images have percolated up into the culture so thoroughly, I guess it’s no longer possible to be an American without experiencing a few of them, if only as album covers (Big Star’s 1974 Radio City, most notably, but there are many), and certainly for anyone with the smallest interest in American art, it’s hard to avoid the name of a man whose work most credit with having legitimized color photography as an art form. Before Eggleston, there had been a sharp divide between black-and-white and color: artists used the former, tourists used the latter. After Eggleston, or with him, everything was altered.

In 1998, when I was twenty-three, I didn’t know anything about William Eggleston. I was a few months into my first magazine job, with the Oxford American (then in Mississippi, now in Arkansas). A woman named Maude (pronounced “Maw-dee”) Schuyler Clay was helping us as a photography consultant. She’s an excellent Southern photographer herself and happens to be Eggleston’s cousin. She also said a very perceptive thing about his work, namely that he started shooting the South just at the moment it began to look more like other places. Its banality, in other words, and not its exoticism, called to him first.

Maude came into the office one day. The magazine was doing a story on the great blues musician Mississippi Fred McDowell, and we wanted to run a memorable image of him, and probably the most memorable ever taken is one that Eggleston shot. It shows McDowell at his own funeral, in his coffin, wearing his spotless white Mason’s apron. Maude had been able, through family connections, to borrow an original print of this picture. I can see her carrying it through the offices. That scene in Pulp Fiction where the guy has the briefcase that glows like it’s full of magic gold? This was close to it. Every person in the office crowded around her as she pulled back the black cover of the portfolio she’d brought. The picture did, I think, literally give off light. Not gold, but pink, the pale pink of the satin around McDowell’s pinched, embalmed face. The whole corner of the art room glowed with that particular pink. I barely knew the brilliantly slashing music of Mississippi Fred McDowell at the time—I’d heard his signature “Shake ’Em On Down” and maybe one other song—but I was convinced that this photograph of his dead body was one of the most remarkable pictures my eyes had ever come up against. You knew a master had taken it, the same way that if you were to see a Caravaggio in a pawn shop one day without knowing who that painter was, you’d know it didn’t belong there, or that it belonged anywhere.

Front door of William Eggleston’s apartment, Memphis, 2016. Photograph by Stefan Ruiz

“Could you tell me about Fred McDowell’s funeral?” I asked Eggleston in Memphis this past April. He sat in the small, light-drenched atelier of his apartment, in a building where he had lived once before, fifty years ago, on first coming to the city with his new wife, a childhood friend named Rosa Kate Dossett, a petite, pretty, dark-haired woman. They were two young, well-to-do kids from the delta. The money had given them freedom, and they brought the freedom with them to town. Not needing to make good, they set out to create themselves. “Plantation aristocracy,” said Eggleston, making a face like the phrase smelled bad.

Bourbon and cigarettes. An endless chain of the latter, only a certain portion of the former—he’s rationed. He is seventy-six. He is debonair and still has the excellent, sculpted nose I knew from photographs. You do not want to leave him alone with your wife or girlfriend for very long.

Rosa had died barely nine months before that visit. She remained his wife all those years; they never divorced. Their domestic arrangements were unorthodox. In a nutshell, he neither hid nor apologized for his mistresses. She accepted it, or, as I believe the old-world vocabulary had it, accommodated.

He performed a quick reenactment of one of their fights. She: ragingly angry about a girlfriend. He: “What do you want me to do? Do you want a divorce?” She: “How dare you mention that word around me!” (This stuff is a matter of record. When I say he didn’t hide it, I mean he really didn’t hide it. Otherwise I’d never cross the line.)

It may no longer be good feminism to say so, but I’ve known plenty of women who would put up with a lot to be married to someone as not boring as William Eggleston.

He put his hands together as if in a feeble kind of prayer.

“I miss her,” he said. He sort of whimpered, playfully but not. I managed something barely above pleasantry: “There must have been something strong between you.”

“I can’t believe I don’t see her walking into this room right this minute!” he said.

That was him. Not abstraction. The thing.

Nagra reel-to-reel recorder, William Eggleston’s apartment, Memphis, 2016. Photograph by Stefan Ruiz

Now he was back, after all those decades, in the hotel-like building they had shared, but alone this time. Well, without Rosa, but not alone. Students from a nearby art school were cycling in and out, mostly keeping him company, and tending to be bright, attractive young women. The one who was there when we arrived said, “He’s my best friend.”

It was the very beginning of evening—you could slip up and call it late afternoon if not thinking—and Eggleston played the piano as he talked. A huge, gorgeous black Bösendorfer (“Chopin’s favorite,” he said). It took up most of the room. On the wall in the other room was a portrait of Bach, the artist Eggleston mentions more than any other. It was not a poster but an oil painting, a Chinese copy of the 1740s Haussmann portrait from Leipzig.

Eggleston wore a beautiful midnight-blue cotton suit and a red bow tie, which was untied, not sloppily but deliberately, even pointedly. The silk was crisp, and one side was pulled down lower than the other. I wondered, Was it an affectation (i.e., an idiosyncrasy)? Or was there a tradition I’d never heard of, or run into, of wearing one’s bow tie this way, not at the end of the night, when any person might be photographed dishabille, but in daylight hours, boldly? I called the people at GQ—I used to work for them, I still have friends there. I asked about it. Was this a thing, or was it just Eggleston? Just Eggleston, right? No, it was a thing. Jim Nelson, the editor of the magazine, emailed back at once, and did not dishonor his office. “There is indeed a tradition,” he wrote, “mostly embraced by flamboyant Italian tycoons with zero fucks to give. I think of the late, great Fiat billionaire Gianni Agnelli, who routinely wore his wristwatches outside his sleeve, the blades of his ties longer in the back, or hiking boots or loafers with suits.” Nelson described the style as “rebellion within a frame.” The magazine’s in-house style guru, Mark Anthony Green, answered too, and made a simple but deep observation: the bow tie wasn’t really untied. “It’s tied,” he said. “Just not in a bow.” I looked at a picture. He was right; the two lengths were crossed over and made into a half knot. Possible translation: I know the rules, but am confident enough to break them. Alternate translation: whimsy.

To continue reading, buy Aperture Issue 224, “Sounds,”or subscribe to Aperture and never miss an issue.

John Jeremiah Sullivan is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and the southern editor of The Paris Review.

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