Critic Mark Feeney on William Eggleston

Boston Globe photography and arts critic, Mark Feeney, presented his lecture "Four Photographers on Three Wheels: William Eggleston's Tricycle and Before" at American Art's McEvoy Auditorium the other night, as the second speaker of this year's Clarice Smith Distinguished Lectures in American Art. Looking at Eggleston's now iconic image (which is actually titled Tricycle (Memphis)) from the early 1970s of a slightly beat-up tricycle in the foreground of a scene of suburban gloom, Feeney took us on a tour of the emergence of color photography as an art form, the culture and politics of the era, and the appearance of tricycles—and bicycles—in other artists's work. Two wheels may be more common in the realm of adulthood, but the tricycle speaks only to childhood—its beginning as well as its end.

Feeney began his talk by showing us what he called "twentieth-century images that reflect and shape their eras," by Alfred Stieglitz, Dorothea Lange, and Robert Frank, before turning things over to Eggleston's three-wheeler. "Which one doesn't belong?" Feeney asked us. He then brought the image in context by speaking about the rise of the new south in American culture in the mid-1970s that culminated with the election of Jimmy Carter in 1976, the same year that Memphis-born Eggleston showed the tricycle and other photographs in a groundbreaking show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Feeney then took us on a tour of other photographers' work including Helen Levitt, Garry Winogrand, and Bill Owens, all of whom featured a tricycle as an element in one of their photographs before Eggleston shot his. Perhaps making the most striking was Owens' Richie, an image of a toddler on a Big Wheel toting a toy gun (for bonus points, the November issue of Smithsonian magazine has a feature on Richie who is, as they say, all grown up.).

The evening was a tribute to the humble tricycle, but a fairly rapturous one at times. "Like the chariot of a very youthful god," Feeney called it. Towards the end of the program he told us, "I've always loved this photograph but I can't figure out why. This one just sticks with me."

If you missed Feeney's lecture you can view it online. This year’s final Clarice Smith lecture, by artist Sarah Sze, takes place on Tuesday, November 16.