The Graceland Portfolio
An invitation to photograph Elvis Presley's mansion, Graceland, on the outskirts of Memphis, provided the opportunity to produce his most intense dye-transfers. He established a sense of the emptiness of the house, a mausoleum inhabited by the paraphernalia of a legend. Elvis's style was excessive and color was the language of his legend, from pink Cadillacs to blue shoes.
Graceland, a euphemism for heaven, is a culmination of the great American interior. Elvis's journey from humble origins in a shack in Tupelo, Mississippi, to the house on the hill was the enactment of the American dream. Fifty years before Walker Evans had photographed the sharecroppers' interiors with all their poverty and austerity in emphatic black and white. Eggleston took on the sequel in wildly saturated color.
Several of his pictures appeared in an official guidebook to the house and the portfolio of eleven dye-transfers, William Eggleston's Graceland (1984) was exhibited in Washington. A pattern became evident from these commissions, as if Eggleston was constructing a grand plan. The monumental nature of Graceland, a site on his doorstep, and the scale of the portfolio itself, serves as a prefatory sign for his major undertaking of the Eighties, The Democratic Forest.