Hilton Als' "William Eggleston's Lonely South"

William Eggleston, Untitled (1972)

I like the way Hilton Als interprets the above photo by William Eggleston. In his absorbing “Photo Booth: William Eggleston’s Lonely South” (The New Yorker, February 9, 2026), he writes,

The real stunner when it comes to showing us community is Eggleston’s 1972 image of a young Black woman, sitting in a church pew with other women of color, turning to look over her shoulder at the camera. The woman’s hair is straightened—“correct”—and she is thin; she wears a sleeveless, wine-colored dress, and the long fingers of her left hand rest on her left shoulder, partly hiding her mouth. It’s a powerful evocation of the psychology of beauty in the American South. Is she covering her mouth because she’s been made to see her lips as too big? Does she straighten her hair because the “natural” look has caught on only in big cities, where women have more freedom to express themselves, or is she simply trying to align herself with the older women she is sitting with, to be one with them? By looking at the white man behind the camera, is she doing something forbidden? We’ll never know. And it’s those many mysteries, rooted in the real and the possible, that continue to make photography in general, and Eggleston’s in particular, so fascinating.

Rather than read speculative narrative into Eggleston’s image, Als asks questions. He proceeds interrogatively. To me, this is the preferable way to go when dealing with an art as enigmatic as photography.