William Eggleston: Portraits review – momentous, trivial, marvellous

Even if it is just a tract of Tennessee land, or a ceiling, or some trash on the ground, everything is a portrait in William Eggleston’s work. A portrait less of a moment than of a place and an age. Eggleston never diminishes what he sees but somehow enlarges both the momentous and the trivial. Some unknown pensive guy swallowing a burger and staring at it with a kind of avarice, a curator in a phonebooth, a bloke on a bed, a woman alone at the side of a long and empty road, a girlfriend in tears – each photograph is freighted with untold stories. You feel their weight along with the heat of the day, the stale air-conditioned chill in the room, the smell of smoke and beer and sweat in the nightclub, the car-seat vinyl, the instant’s lassitude.

Eggleston’s photography has been derided for its ordinariness, for its compositional blankness, even for its use of colour. This now seems absurd. How could his critics not see what was there – the things unrevealed but somehow unaccountably present? Eggleston’s photography gets under your skin, just as he got under the skin of Memphis (where he was born in 1939), of Tallahatchie County, of the south and of social situations, capturing both the discomposure and awkward indifference of his subjects.

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He does it by noticing what’s there. Which is all there is to Eggleston, whose photographs are all skin and surface. That’s where the substance is, and in the distances between things: in the tattoo and the cigarette left burning on the side, in the buttons and the dress as much as in the woman wearing it.

The last time I wrote about Eggleston, he engulfed me for days, and seemed to recalibrate the way I saw the world. This is a gift only great art shares. The National Portrait Gallery exhibition, with about 100 images, takes us from early black and white images, to well-known as well as previously unseen works in colour, via a fragment of video. It is a marvellous, compact show that never sags or leaves you drained.

Almost every image is arresting. The show opens with black and white photography. Even then, he says, he was thinking in colour. Their everyday ordinariness is consummate. Lucille Fleming, who worked as housekeeper for Eggleston’s family for over 50 years, makes a bed. On another bed, the photographer’s mother reaches for her foot, captured in a shot so grainy it seems thick with an inner frowziness. Eggleston used police surveillance film and a miniature spy camera for this and other early images: he had to reduce the size of the film and cut new sprockets by hand (in the dark) to make it fit in the camera.

Many of these early shots are, unusually for Eggleston, accompanied by tantalising captions about their subjects: cotton-planter William Pearson, whose wife Betty became a civil rights activist; bulky Randall Lyon, an openly gay (not easy in the south in the 1970s) roadie, cook and poet, hands raised as though in prayer, a medieval supplicant with droopy moustache and overalls, twisting on his chair, eyes closed. What a tender shot this is, among portraits that are filled with humour, affection, aggression, mistrust, curiosity, ambivalence and perhaps even a degree of malice, whether on the part of the photographer or of his subjects. You can’t always tell. Eggleston’s images ricochet with contrary feelings and impulses. Here’s “eccentric dentist” TC Boring, naked in his red-lit apartment, later murdered and his house set on fire.

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Eggleston’s black and white images – an anxious woman turning to the camera as she waits at a travel insurance counter (almost everything slightly out of focus in the blur of her turning and fixing her eyes on the photographer); people driving and doing mundane jobs; guys in suits meeting in a parking lot – neither dignify nor seem voyeuristic. Yet they are never ordinary. It is as if Eggleston were saying “No comment” and that refusal is enough.

A man waits at a kerb, as erect as a soldier. No car passes. He stands like a diver psyching himself up beside a stop sign. The man and the hydrant, the sign and the telegraph poles, all at attention in the sun. The only movement is the swerve of the empty road sweeping round the corner. It feels like everything in the image has reached a final point of arrival: all has stopped.

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Eggleston continued taking black and white images into the 1970s, although the earliest colour image here – a kid in an apron bussing trolleys outside a supermarket – was shot in 1965. His profile is caught and flattened by late afternoon light. He rams the trolleys along with concentrated purpose, his silhouette cast on the building’s siding while a woman watches. “Some kind of pimply, freckle-faced guy in the late sunlight. And by God, it all worked,” Eggleston has said of this, which he regards as his first successful colour image, the first frame he shot.

Much later, in 1988, he went to photograph the writer Eudora Welty. It took him, he says, “maybe less than half a minute.” For Eggleston, photography seems to be almost entirely instinctive, though he insists that his reading is almost obsessively technical. Of course, the camera sees more than the photographer, but there is a rightness about Eggleston that is a matter of exactitude as well as indifference. Part of that exactness and richness comes from the apprehension of the reality in front of him. He adds no props. Everything is already there in a subject’s unstudied pose, in the floral dress against the floral patterned glider chair, in the way the sheriff points his gun down at the patchwork quilt as he sits looking belligerent and stupid on the bed, in the raised beer bottle and hard stare of the woman in the crowded club.

Whether Eggleston is photographing the well-known (Joe Strummer with a Coke, Dennis Hopper driving) or a busboy with a tray of dirty plates, kids at a fence, his uncle and his driver, his one-time lover Viva sitting in the dirt and staring into the distance, he treats them all the same, devouring that sudden confrontation and the particularity of atmosphere and tension, their sometimes skittish alertness to the camera and their self-absorption. It is all there. What a great show.

• William Eggleston: Portraits is at the National Portrait Gallery from 21 July until 23 October.