Sundance Doc Day travels briefly to Mayfield

(Photo: William Eggleston. Visit his official website here.)

Since Monday is "Doc Day" on the Sundance Channel, of course I'm more often than not tuned in. Tonight's documentary feature was a film called "William Eggleston in the Real World". Eggleston is a famous, successful, at first controversial, and quite alcoholic photographer who hails from Memphis, Tennessee.

Born in 1939, and acclaimed since the 1960's, he is now often referred to as the "father of modern color photography". He's a guy who tends to shuffle around peering myopically through his camera lens shooting photographs of the most mundane images imaginable.

Things like the abandoned shoes under a bed or a plain naked lightbulb screwed into a socket on a cracked, squalid ceiling. Often, his shots are composed of only objects, but occassionally they include people. Some of Eggleston's work is beautiful, no doubt, but I'd say that's the exception.

It's all very, in my opinion, avante guarde and depressing; somewhat hopeless, even. I do respect Eggleston's attitude that photography is a science of the moment, a philosophy I actually hold myself. Otherwise? I'm still a little of the not-sure-what-to-make-of-his-work opinion. (Which probably makes me kind of a boob, but there you have it.)

In any case, I wrote all that so I can tell you this: the movie begins with Eggleston shuffling around Mayfield, Kentucky, of all places, taking photographs. We had to rewind the film a few times in order to get our minds around the fact that, yes, that's indeed Mayfield. And it's not like they didn't say it was Mayfield, because they did. We just had a hard time believing it.

If you, as they say in these parts, aren't from around here, I should explain that Mayfield is a town some twenty miles south of Paducah with absolutely nothing going on, unless you count smashed flat barbecue sandwiches and writer Bobbie Ann Mason.

Mayfield isn't don't-blink or-you'll-miss-it, but it is quite small, and seems to produce a particularly nasal, exceptionally twangy southern accent in many--not all mind you--of its residents. Strangely, Mayfield is also somehow responsible for a disproportionately large number of hair dressers (not stylists) who are all female and of the opinion that Big Hair never went out of fashion. When you get highlights in Mayfield? It often still actually means enduring a shower cap and a crochet hook. They call it "getting frosted". As in, "Hey, Debbie! Did you git yer hay-year frawsted agin? Key-yoot!"

So, yah, Bobbie Ann Mason aside, we were a little surprised to find Eggleston there. Turns out he was documenting the town at the request of Gus Van Sant who considers Mayfield his home town.

I ask you, HOW COULD I NOT KNOW THIS?

Gus Van Sant directed: Paris, je t'aime, Finding Forrester, Good Will Hunting, My Own Private Idaho, and Drugstore Cowboy, to name a few. He has a writing credit on some of these and many other films. And he's from Mayfield.

Jeez. Who knew?

(Christa--did you know this?)

I did not know this.

So there you go.