FLASHING

Once again I’ve been thinking about food photography, which also of course includes drink.  It seems, in many ways, that it could be a very difficult and frustrating profession, but the only food photographer I know, of any sort, Anne Fishbein who and as far as I can tell is a perfectly happy woman, and takes photographs like this, which are great:

As discussed passim on this blog, most photographers of any sort, have at one time or another taken photographs of food and drink, not least William Eggleston, although his photographs always seem to be about something other than food and drink, which is obviously a very good thing.

And I was indulging my Eggleston obsession the other day and came across an article and interview in Vanity Fair by John Heilpern from November 2015, titled “Does William Eggleston Love Women? You’re Damn Right!”  I really don’t know how many ironies there are in that headline. Anyway, at the end of the interview Heilpern asks if he can take a picture of Eggleston on his cellphone.The article runs:     

“‘Go ahead,’ he obliged. I took three of him. Then he sportingly offered to take a cellphone shot of me, although he confessed he didn’t know how. After a little explanation, he figured out my cellphone’s push button and took one picture, scarcely glancing through the lens.   

“The difference was laughable. Mine were just the usual snapshots, while his was a single, masterly composition of someone seated amid the day-for-night kitsch of El Quijote. He’s a magic man, that’s for sure.”

Well yes, Eggleston is a magic man, but I still don’t quite know why so many of his interviews seem to involve El Quijote – a slightly grim Spanish restaurant next to the Chelsea Hotel in Manhattan.

         

Hold these thoughts. Last Friday I went out with Jason Oddy, a man who seems as far from being a food photographer as is possible.  But he told me that Eggleston was one of his great heroes, and it was seeing photographs by Eggleston, more than any others, that made him want to take photographs. Oddy generally takes photographs like this:

         

We were having an art and food night. We started out at Mosaic House in Earls Court at an exhibition by the Persian artist Behjat Sadr (1924-2007), titled Dusted Waters.  There was a DJ set by her grandson.  Her work looks like this:

There was wine to be had at the Mosaic Rooms, and afterwards we rolled out into the night and thought it would be only appropriate to go to a Persian restaurant and we ended up in Apadana, in Kensington High Street, which has been there since pre-revolutionay days. It was founded in 1967.  So obviously there was wine there too.

It was a decent enough place - we had the hot mezza sampler, spicy Koobideh, and seabass.

And I’m no fool, I don’t brandish my camera when “real” photographers are around, but I asked Jason to take some photographs, and he did, and everything looked great – better than I’d have taken (obviously) and better than it actually appeared in “reality.” There was also this fellow in the restaurant:

The next day I looked up another article about Eggleston, this one by Augusten Burroughs, from The New York Times Style Magazine, dated October, 2016. The title of the article was “William Eggleston, the Pioneer of Color Photography” – I can imagine more banal titles, but not easily.

And the end of the article runs, “We leave the offices of the Eggleston Trust and go to his apartment. The first thing one sees upon entering is a bright red plastic sign with a yellow border, printed with capitalized white sans-serif text. It warns, “THE OCCUPANT OF THIS APARTMENT WAS RECENTLY HOSPITALIZED FOR COMPLICATIONS DUE TO ALCOHOL. HE IS ON A MEDICALLY PRESCRIBED DAILY PORTION OF ALCOHOL. IF YOU BRING ADDITIONAL ALCOHOL INTO THIS APARTMENT YOU ARE PLACING HIM IN MORTAL DANGER. YOUR ENTRY AND EXIT INTO THIS APARTMENT IS BEING RECORDED. WE WILL PROSECUTE SHOULD THIS NOTICE BE IGNORED. THE EGGLESTON FAMILY.”

Both Augusten Burroughs and I find ourselves wondering where exactly you find a doctor who prescribes a “daily portion of alcohol,” and what exactly is the dosage.  It wouldn’t happen in Tehran, I’m sure.

QUIXOTIC DRINKING

The new Vanity Fair contains a (frankly rather perfunctory) interview with the great photographer William Eggleston.  The picture below is from an entirely different source - and I'm sorry that I can't find the name of the photographer, nor can I tell you what he's drinking.

The interview takes place in El Quixote restaurant, adjacent to the Chelsea Hotel.  I used to eat there once in a while when I lived in New York. I always ordered the paella.  My memories aren’t the clearest but I seem to recall the food was pretty good but also kind of overpriced, and there were always tales of people getting upset stomachs, though my own cast-iron constitution never suffered.  And I never saw any of this mob there:

Anyway, during the Vanity Fair interview Mr. Eggleston doesn’t order any food.  If he was going to have any, we’re told, he’d have the “signature lobster,” but he doesn’t.  He has and I'm quoting now, “champagne mixed with vodka in a tall glass,” which strikes me as a drink of pure evil, though at the age of 76, Mr. E is obviously entitled to drink whatever the heck the wants.

Anyway Eggleston and the interviewer have a conversation in which the scribe discovers that old William likes women and guns – something that any sane person might already have intuited by looking at his photographs, and he rounds off the session by ordering another drink:  double vodka, no champagne. 

It doesn’t sound as though the great man took any photographs while at El Quijote – which is a shame because, as I’ve said elsewhere on this blog, his food photographs are among the best ever taken.

More than that, William Eggleston is also massively photogenic, and always looks good with a drink in his hand.  The picture above is taken by Stephen Shore, the one below by Jurgen Teller.  A drink in one hand, Charlotte Rampling's head in the other, does it get any better than that?

THE STONED AND THE FURY

I’ve written elsewhere on this blog about William Faulkner’s reluctance to attend a White House dinner for Nobel Prize winners, complaining it was “a long way to go just to eat.”

http://psycho-gourmet.blogspot.com/2010/10/as-i-lay-drinking.html

And I know he certainly didn’t want to go to Stockholm to receive the Nobel Prize, though he did go in the end, and now I’ve been reading a book titled Faulkner’s Mississippi (text by Willie Morris, photographs by William Eggleston) which contains an account of Faulkner’s days prior to his visit to Stockholm.

In honour of the trip he went on a colossal multi-day binge, in and around his  home in Oxford, Mississippi.  The family watched for a few days and then decided to sober him up.  They and told him it was a few days earlier than it actually was, that the trip was imminent and that he’d better pull himself together.  This was on a Saturday, though they told Faulkner it was Monday.  But drunk or sober Faulkner was no fool.  When he asked somebody where his stepson was, they replied he was at the football game.  Faulkner’s reaction, “Somebody’s been deceivin’ me.  They don’t play football games on Monday.  I’ve got three more days to drink.”

When Faulkner was in Hollywood, he drank prolifically at Musso and Frank (passim in this blog).  And I was just trawling the internet continuing my obsession with the work of William Eggleston, and I happened to find this photograph of his, which I’d never seen before.  My favorite photographer takes a picture of my favorite bar: does it get any better than this?

EGGING ON EGGLESTON

At the weekend I had a Slammin’ Slider – that was the name on the side of the food truck anyway.  My sliders contained pulled pork and were scattered with crispy fried onions – and they were just fine if you like sliders, though I'm never sure I really do.  The Loved One would have had the Philly Cheese Steak but the truck had run out of mayonnaise, which seems a slam of a different sort: she had the potato croquettes instead with a dip that may or may not have been mayo-based.  These were fine too.  I'm pretty sure I like potato croquettes better than sliders.  So why did I order sliders?  Just one more imponderable.

We were at Paris Photo L.A.; a photography fair on the Paramount Studio lot, a place I’d never set foot before, though I’d driven and walked past often enough. I was there, among other things, to gawk at William Eggleston, who was doing a signing at the Gagosian stand.  Mr. E is a famous southern dandy and drinker.  I can’t say that he looked exactly stewed at the signing but he did look pleasantly marinated.

It would be pretty darn idle and reductive to think of Eggleston as a “food photographer,” but even so, he’s taken two of the greatest pictures of food and drink I’ve ever seen  This is the first:

I’m reminded of it every time I get on a plane.  I always get a window seat if I can, and I always try to arrange my glass so that the sun might shine through it in precisely this way.  But it never quite does.  And the image seems so still, so calm, so isolated, so untroubled and unhassled, so optimistic; not the way I ever feel when I’m on a plane, but the way I always want to feel. 

The second great photograph is this one, rather more complicated in some ways, I think: 

I've seen it captioned "Sumner, Mississippi," and we know that's where Eggleston was raised on a “plantation," and I’d guess this photograph was taken there.   My first superficial impression was that here was a grand spread of southern food laid out for a feast, maybe Thanksgiving; but of course when you look even slightly more closely you see it’s a meal for one.  My friends from the South also tell me this is pretty much everyday fare down there.  I've also seen the photograph captioned "Dinner."

Even so this seems lot of trouble to go to for just one person, and it’s not just the food but the silverware and the flower arrangement.  And perhaps there’s something sad and lonely about going to all this effort when you're by yourself, something a bit Miss Haversham.   But then, maybe that’s the whole point.  Just because you’re eating along doesn’t mean you have to slouch on the couch and eat a slab of pizza. Southerners are great believers in keeping up standards.  And maybe there’s something rather noble in going to precisely this amount of trouble, in taking pleasure and delight in small things even when there’s nobody there to share them with you.  This to a large extent is what Eggleston’s work is about; and, of course, the camera is there to help in the sharing, to be an observer, and perhaps to be an honored guest at the table. 

I’m not sure that Eggleston is a big eater, and according to an interview he did with the New Yorker in 2008, he had a troubled relationship with at least one eating establishment: the Lamplighter Lounge in Memphis, from which he was banned for at least a decade.  There he is above at the Lamplighter, in a photo by Stanley Booth.  

The celebrated Miss Shirley was a bartender at the Lamplighter Lounge for the best part of four decades: she died in 2010.  The cause of Eggleston’s ban, according to that New Yorker interview: “I got really drunk one time, and I threw a hamburger at Shirley, who had just made it.”  The ban sounds fair enough to me.