The Beautiful Mysterious: The Extraordinary Gaze of William Eggleston

Director’s Introduction and Acknowledgments

ROBERT SAARNIO

The University of Mississippi Museum is exceptionally pleased to share in these pages one of its most significant collection holdings, the fifty-five prints by photographer William Eggleston that were given to us by William Ferris, Joel R. Williamson Eminent Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and founding director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi. This publication establishes a transformative moment in the Museum’s history, as it not only celebrates this extraordinary photographic print collection but also constitutes the first in what will be a series of publications highlighting the diverse collections of artworks and artifacts held by the Museum.

Museum staff and I were highly privileged to have worked closely with William Ferris in recent years as we developed the exhibition shown in our galleries September 13, 2016-February 18, 2017: The Beautiful Mysterious: The Extraordinary Gaze of William Eggleston. Since my appointment as Museum director in 2012, Professor Ferris has extended to me a profound degree of warm-spirited collegiality that has significantly advanced my capacity to lead this academic museum, and I want to take this opportunity to thank him for such great depth of kindness and thoughtfulness. His generosity and his vision in behalf of the Museum over four decades have had impacts of extraordinary meaning to the communities we serve, both academic and public, that will be felt for generations to come.

In conjunction with the exhibition, the Museum hosted a symposium in October 2016 with a morning panel that included William Ferris, novelist and guest curator Megan Abbott, and photographer Maude Schuyler Clay, moderated by author Lisa Howorth. An afternoon panel featured Emily Ballew Neff, executive director of the Memphis Brooks Museum; Richard McCabe, curator of photography at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art; and University of Mississippi art historian Kris Belden-Adams, with William Ferris as moderator. Two programs in February 2017 featured Anne Wilkes Tucker, curator of photography emerita, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and New York–based filmmaker Michael Almereyda. Tucker presented a lecture considering the Southernness of Eggleston and his body of work. Almereyda screened his documentary film William Eggleston in the Real World and participated in a Q&A moderated by photographer and art professor Brooke White. Our successful exhibition, symposium, and public programs encouraged us to publish this catalog of our Eggleston photographs.

We are highly indebted to several organizations and individuals who have both inspired and supported these initiatives, beginning with William Ferris himself as donor and guiding participant along the way. The Beautiful Mysterious exhibition was entirely underwritten through the generous sponsorship of Friends of the Museum. Dorothy Howorth, former president of the Friends’ Board, took an early and inspirational lead in advocating for the exhibition and the catalog; without her tireless dedication and fundraising acumen, these outcomes would have been on a much longer pathway to realization. We are deeply indebted to Ms. Howorth and the entire Friends of the Museum Board. We also extend sincere thanks for support from the University of Mississippi Lecture Series and to the planning committee for the symposium, the guest lecture, and the film screening and discussion: Dorothy Howorth, Carlyle Wolfe, Lynn Wilkins, Brooke White, Rebecca Phillips, Marti Funke, and Ann Abadie. The publication of this volume has benefited greatly from the guiding efforts and support initiatives of the Friends’ publication committee: John Hardy, Dorothy Howorth, Mary Thompson, Lynn Wilkins, Carlyle Wolfe, and Ann Abadie.

We also must thank the Friends of the Museum for their collective support of this book project. The board stepped forward to allocate support from the proceeds of their highly successful annual fundraising event Harvest Supper, recognizing the significance of the Eggleston catalog. These sponsors have made the book you hold in your hands entirely possible by providing the essential resources to make this project happen.

This publication is very significantly the result of the contributions of its editor and project manager, Ann Abadie, associate director emerita of the University’s Center for the Study of Southern Culture. On a voluntary basis she has overseen this project, managed its production calendar, and edited every text element and all images with a sharp and highly experienced eye. She has been guide, mentor, and advisor at every stage of the production. This beautiful tribute to the Museum’s Eggleston Collection would not have been possible without Ann’s professionalism and many years of publishing experience. We are all exceptionally grateful to her.

Within the University, the Museum exists in an ecosystem of support that makes everything we do possible. The board of trustees of the Institutions of Higher Learning of the State of Mississippi has supported this museum since the 1974 transfer of the City of Oxford’s Mary Buie Museum to University stewardship. Chancellor Jeffrey S. Vitter has been a devotedly steadfast friend of the Museum, as has Noel E. Wilkin, provost and executive vice chancellor for academic affairs. The Museum is indebted to Chancellor Vitter and Provost Wilkin for their belief in the enriching power of the arts and culture on our campus. They stand at the forefront of a University leadership team that not only understands the meaning of a teaching museum to its academic community but also enables and encourages us daily to extend our service beyond campus boundaries to the families and communities of Oxford, the state of Mississippi, and our Southeast region.

To our publishing partner, the University Press of Mississippi, we extend heartfelt thanks. Director Craig Gill and designer John Langston were essential partners from the origin of this project, and the coherence and beauty of the outcome are very significantly a result of their talents and the University Press’s many years of national leadership in academic publishing.

This project would not have been possible without the considerable assistance of the William Eggleston Artistic Trust and its director, Winston Eggleston. Throughout the process he has made himself readily available, and the guidance of the Trust that he represents has been invaluable, given its role as the steward of the legacy of the artist himself, William Eggleston. Additional assistance came from the David Zwirner Gallery of New York City and its staff members Julia Joern and Ashley Tickle, to whom we are also indebted and extend our sincere gratitude.

Last, but far from least, is the talented and extraordinarily dedicated professional staff of this Museum. This is a team that is notable for its vision, its collective body of wide-ranging skills, and its individual areas of expertise. Specific thanks must be extended to former Collections Manager and Exhibitions Coordinator Marti Funke, whose professionalism and tireless energy stand at the heart of all she does. The special activities that curator of education Emily McCauley developed for participants of all ages in conjunction with the Eggleston exhibition provided inspiration for museum programming that reached hundreds of participants of all ages both on- and off-site from September 2016 to February 2017. The Museum’s preparator Taylor Kite assisted in the hanging and installation of The Beautiful Mysterious exhibition, an initial project for this highly skilled colleague in his first week of joining our team in 2016. Taken as a whole, this is a staff that not only sustains me; they inspire me.

I close by celebrating our members and supporters and the University and general public communities to whose enrichment we dedicate all that we do. The Museum exists for you, and we thrive in direct proportion to your participation and your involvement in securing our future. This museum is committed to serving widely diverse audiences, and we work daily to earn their appreciation for our efforts to inspire community engagement with the art and cultural treasures that we hold in public trust.

Please enjoy this exceptional publication, The Beautiful Mysterious: The Extraordinary Gaze of William Eggleston, produced in the Museum’s eightieth year of existence. It is a source of compelling pride to celebrate this signature collection and this brilliant American artistic genius, with a beautiful catalog that launches a series of publications that will bring the University’s collections to wider audiences.

Note on the Collection

MARTI A. FUNKE

William Ferris met William Eggleston in 1975 while spending the summer making films in Memphis at the Center for Southern Folklore. The two Bills became close friends, visiting in Memphis and in Oxford beginning in 1979 after Ferris became director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi, where Eggleston was enrolled as a student from 1958 through 1960.

Early on, Ferris began to purchase Eggleston photographs and later contributed fifty-five to the University of Mississippi Museum. The Museum exhibited thirty-six of these photographs in The Beautiful Mysterious: The Extraordinary Gaze of William Eggleston for four months, from September 13, 2016, to February 18, 2017, along with sponsoring a symposium, a guest lecture, a film, and a variety of educational activities for all ages. The exhibition traveled to the Mennello Museum in Orlando, Florida, as the first stop on a national tour. The University Museum had sponsored two previous exhibitions from the Ferris Collection, one in 1991 and the other in 2004.¹

At the symposium for The Beautiful Mysterious exhibition held in October 2016 and transcribed in this volume, Bill Ferris gave a detailed account of his friendship with Eggleston and talked about purchasing the photographs he eventually gave to the University Museum. Briefly, he said that these are images that I saw on Bill’s piano, admired, and picked up…. They were whatever he had shot and printed when we visited. I selected only a few out of probably 1,000 or more that I looked at during my visits with Bill.

The Eggleston photographs Ferris donated to the University Museum are important for many reasons. The images were selected by a longtime friend and an important figure in Southern Studies during visits at Eggleston’s home from the personal collections of photographs he made and developed or had printed. Bill Ferris looked through the photographs and made these selections. Thus, this is a collection selected and curated by the artist’s close friend. A collection doesn’t really get more extraordinary than that.

In addition, the images have Eggleston’s handwritten notes on them about location, people, dates, and/or projects. Many have notes written directly to Bill Ferris regarding their time together at that location or Ferris’s interest in the photograph. Seven of the photographs in the collection are early black and whites, five that have never been exhibited or published.² The Moose Lodge dye transfer depicting a building near Greenwood, Mississippi, in 1972 is one of the very first color dye transfers Eggleston attempted. Eggleston’s cousin and protégée Maude Schuyler Clay says this one was made in Chicago, and she remembers its being the first or, at the least, one of the first. Thus the University Museum’s collection has rare Eggleston photographs, including little- or never-shown black and whites and one of the first dye transfers the Father of Color Photography produced.

Designing the exhibition of The Beautiful Mysterious: The Extraordinary Gaze of William Eggleston was a tremendous responsibility. The collection includes marvelous photographs by one of the greatest photographers in the world. Eggleston’s work has been the subject of more than one hundred solo exhibitions at prominent institutions worldwide, is held in major international museum collections, and is published in more than seventy portfolios, monographs, and exhibition catalogs. Each photograph selected by William Ferris and curated by author Megan Abbott needed to be highlighted. The walls were painted aubergine with ample space between the photographs to light each one individually and to accentuate the white border Eggleston preserved on each photograph. Instead of large mats around the photographs, the frames precisely match their dimensions. The