The Mind’s Eye of Huger Foote

The photographer’s work is kaleidoscopic; often, you might not quite know what you’re looking at, but you’ll know you want to keep looking.

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“The sun was coming from outside,” writes Wallace Stevens in the poem “Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself.” The sun was coming from outside: not from the crumpled fog of dreams, not from within the mind, but from the piercing clear of dawn. “It was like / A new knowledge of reality.” 

Huger Foote, a Memphis-raised artist who now divides his time between this city and New York’s Hudson Valley, seems always to be seeking a new knowledge of reality. Foote is a photographer, which is to say, a professional observer of the sun and where it’s coming from — a chronicler of the light, the way it slants and refr

acts, reflects and falls away, plays tricks and lights fires. His work is as kaleidoscopic as his mind; thumb the pages of his monographs and you’ll see photographs made in Europe and in New York, in Africa and in the Mississippi Delta. Often, you might not quite know what you’re looking at, not at first, but you’ll know you want to keep looking. And when you do, you might find:

A woman — we assume, seeing only her calves down, toes curled into sheer black hose and wedged into tattered, watermelon-hued peep-toe heels — takes small strides through the detritus of a vegetable market. Next to her, another person’s single dun-brown work boot stands stolid against the woman’s mid-air stride. On the black rock and tar of the road beneath their feet lies scattered a rainbow of mangled vegetables — carrots snapped in two, a cauliflower half-exploded, onions and turnips catching the light, the long, low angles of early evening.

(Foote remembers he was in the east end of London, at a market in Brick Lane, setting up a photograph of the market waste, when the feet appeared. He was using a tripod, working with medium-format film, he recalls, which required him to shoot at a slow shutter speed. The woman happened to walk across the road at this exact moment, frozen and vivified. The photograph is chaotic but beautiful, unexpected; it’s an invitation to look differently at the world around us — and the image’s signature element was pure luck. “I was seeing this picture, and this person walked into it,” says Foote.)

Outside someone’s gloss-red front door, a deflated Valentine-vulgar Mylar balloon lists and droops; to the left, in front of a window, a chartreuse-green pothos plant springs lush and lively. The image is perfectly bisected into green (glass, leaves and tendrils, reflection) and red (dying balloon, sagging string, thickly painted door). The composition is simple, almost abstracted; when I identify the balloon as such, he says I’m one of a few people to see it for what it is. Yet there’s pathos here, a sense of fragility in the shapes and textures, the growing plant and the lifeless plastic.

A man with an avian face — it’s William Eggleston, the renowned photographer and mentor to Foote — is nestled in a hotel room aglow with golden light; the texture of the wallpaper behind him is so alluring you can almost feel its ridges; a cigarette protrudes like an extra digit from his left hand. The print, as reproduced in Now Here Then, Foote’s 2015 monograph, has been smudged with something black and viscous, and the spidery schmutz looks like smoke from the cigarette. A moon-shaped lamp above Eggleston’s head suggests a crooked halo. You are, for a moment, drawn fully into the room — and then the print’s smudged surface pushes you away again, the medium insisting upon its own presence in the scene.

Origin | Echo

What the Photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred only once: the Photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially. — Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida

When you mention to friends or colleagues that you’re writing about Huger Foote, two questions might follow: 1. How does he pronounce his given name? Answer: “YOU-gee,” sort of like U.G., with the emphasis on the first syllable. (He’s named for an ancestor, his great-grandfather on his father’s side, a planter and politician who served in the Mississippi Senate in the late-nineteenth century.) And 2. Isn’t he related to Shelby Foote, the writer and historian of the American Civil War? Answer: He’s Shelby Foote’s only son.

Huger was born in Memphis’ Methodist Central Hospital (now Methodist University Hospital), in 1961, to Shelby and Gwyn Foote. Thirty-three years later, he would drive himself back to that same hospital, bleeding yet calm, in the strange composure of early delirium, after being shot in the arm during a carjacking. The same hospital, the same human consciousness, once emerging and then, very nearly, fading away. He describes the repetition as an echo, or as an ouroboros, the serpent consuming its tail. It’s also, I think, a sort of double exposure: a clear, primary picture, with another’s ghost hovering — just there, and just out of reach.

How does he pronounce his given name? Answer: “YOU-gee,” sort of like U.G., with the emphasis on the first syllable.

He grew up in a home filled with ideas, books, history, language. Shelby Foote was a prolific writer and constant reader, someone who spent broad swaths of time in his study. This is a cadence I understand intimately: My own mother was an academic — a Shakespeare scholar — and seemed always to be holed up in her tiny home office (a closet, really), with leaning towers of books. From very early childhood, I sensed that she had a life separate from her existence as my mother, a life entirely of her own making, one that had something to do with all that text. I was curious about what went on inside that mysterious parallel life — and about how I could build such a life of my own.

In the Foote household, in 1970s Midtown, words were central: Shelby Foote would, Huger recalls, work on a schedule each day — with a break at noon to watch As the World Turns with Gwyn. “He’d write about 500 words a day, and he did that year in and year out; the trilogy [The Civil War: A Narrative] took him 20 years to write at that schedule.” Foote the younger goes on, “He imparted to me early that there are two kinds of people in the world: those who read great books, and those who don’t — and you’re going to have to decide which one you are. I don’t recall ever feeling like it was a burden, and I am just grateful that I was open-minded about it, because I saw a way to really connect with my dad, which all sons want to do. If my dad had been a duck hunter, I would have wanted to be part of that.”

But photography found him instead. Foote’s grandmother had a Polaroid SX-70 that he started using — his first experience behind the lens, and an immediate fit. He recalls making “constant photographs” in an assemblage he describes as diaristic: a friend riding his bicycle over a jump as a stunt, planes flying overhead, “thousands” of pictures of his dog. The camera, he says, led him to new ways of seeing and being, new manners of attention. Before long, his father noticed how consumed Huger was by the SX-70 and loaned him an Argus camera that he “probably bought in 1930, maybe even earlier.” The Argus required 35-millimeter film, and Huger remembers his mother taking him through the old Ed’s Camera Shop drive-through on Madison at a near-constant clip to develop his daily black-and-white rolls. “I was,” he says, “already there.” He sees the nascence of his fine-art photography in those early, obsessive days when he began documenting the blur between sublime and quotidian.

Serendipity

Something happens every time I return to Memphis. … I see photographs that need to be taken, colors juxtaposed perfectly that just need framing to find their proper order. — Huger Foote, “Homeward,” Sewanee Review  (Summer 2023)

In the late 1980s, Huger Foote was living and working in New York City. After college, at Sarah Lawrence, he spent about six years in Paris, where he got his start in fashion photography as an assistant to renowned photographer Pamela Hanson, whom he cites as a mentor. Following the stint in Paris, he moved back to New York, where he worked in artistically inclined commercial photography, in the tradition of Arthur Elgort. Foote says it was all about “finding the light — taking people to locations and going out for walks until you found the right light,” serendipitously. The lifestyle was exciting, creative, peripatetic — a week in Morocco here, a month in Milan there.

One day in New York’s Soho neighborhood, Foote was walking down Wooster Street and noticed across the street that a large-scale sculpture was being loaded into the Gagosian Gallery (their Wooster St. location has since closed). He recalls a “team of 30 heavy-duty welder guys, real serious New York guys. Not a refined art world scene — it was these intense guys moving this intensely heavy, large thing.” Drawn to the moment, Foote started shooting photos on the one roll of film he was carrying. Before long, a man he remembers as “gruff” approached him and scribbled a name and number with a wax pencil on the ripped-off lid of a cardboard box, saying he would like to see the photos. Later, describing the scene to an architect friend, Foote realized that the “total construction guy” with the wax pencil was, in fact, the American sculptor Richard Serra, known for his minimal but massive, undulating metalworks, on site to install the sculpture Two Rounds for Buster Keaton.

“He [Richard Serra] saw something in my work that was lost on me — something compositional.” — Huger Foote

When Foote later ventured to Serra’s apartment to show him the contact sheet and a few prints, the sculptor was quite taken with the way his work had been captured — so much so that he inquired as to Foote’s availability over the coming months, perhaps sensing a common artistic language. That’s how Foote came to spend half a year on commission for Richard Serra, traveling to Storm King in New York State, to Des Moines, to various locations where the sculptor’s work was placed, to capture the conversations between art and landscape. At that time, Foote was focusing on commercial work, portraits, and the like; Serra’s interest helped to reorient him towards fine art. “He saw something in my work that was lost on me — something compositional.”

Intervention

Midway through the months-long Serra commission, Foote traveled back to Memphis for a two-week visit; this was around 1994, when he was in his early 30s. While home, he was driving late one night when he was carjacked and shot. A man with a gun approached the driver’s-side window, and reflexively, Foote lifted his arm to shield his face — saving his life, in all likelihood, but shattering the arm. Then he floored the gas and drove away, bleeding but, he recalls, “completely lucid, but also detached. I didn’t feel any fear; everything became very still.”

It would take over a year for the final cast to be removed, and Foote spent the year in Memphis. He says he intended “just to stay down here until my bones are healed.” In his mind, he was merely “killing time before I’d get back to my life in New York and my commercial career.”

The universe, in its fashion, had other plans. While he was recuperating, Serra mailed him several books, including Edward Weston’s Daybooks. Weston was a photographer working in the first half of the twentieth century, and the Daybooks record his thoughts about photography, including his development as an artist — and his departure from New York to find himself in the big-skied West. The copies that Serra sent were his own, and even though there was no note in the package, Foote understood the message: “He was saying to me, ‘That’s what this time down there [in Memphis] could be about — you finding yourself as an artist, which is what I think you are.’” Whether or not he fully grasped the message at the time — Foote will tell you, self-deprecatingly, that it “went right over my head” — his life and work began to shift around that time toward a more artistic, meditative, even broken sensibility.

But that wasn’t the only encounter during his recuperation that would transform the course of his life and career. During the same stint in Memphis, adrift after the carjacking, Foote landed an assignment from Vanity Fair to make a portrait of legendary Memphis photographer William Eggleston, surely at or near the top of anyone’s list of influential twentieth-century American artists in the medium. Foote had observed Eggleston at a distance before — it’s a small town in the guise of a city, as anyone who’s spent time here knows — but the two didn’t really know each other. He was able to secure a phone number from a mutual contact, though, and Eggleston “just told me to come on over.”

As Foote tells it, “My experience with portraits was that if you’re lucky, you get half an hour.” When he turned up at the house, Eggleston invited him inside and led him into a nearly bare room containing just two chairs, a reel-to-reel player, and giant speakers, which were “absolutely blasting a Mahalia Jackson gospel record.” Eggleston asked if Foote had any cigarettes. They were both out, so Eggleston produced a sampler box of pipe tobacco which they rolled up in cigarette papers. After a long, long stretch “completely nonverbal,” Foote commented haplessly, “This woman can really sing.” He was not going to get much out of Eggleston that day, not conversation and certainly not a portrait. They sat together for nearly an hour listening to Mahalia Jackson — and then Eggleston leapt up and announced he had to go. “Maybe,” Foote says, “he was sizing me up to see if I could hang.” The younger photographer must have passed the test, because later that same day, Eggleston called and invited him back to the house for Chinese food; the two would go on to become good friends over the next several years, spending time together, making trips in and out of Mississippi. And yes, he eventually got the shot for Vanity Fair.

The time with Eggleston continued the internal reorientation that he was undergoing already — a process he describes as “rearranging the furniture in your mind.” Increasingly, composition took precedence for him, even above subject matter, as he realized he was seeking “the perfection of the composition, the juxtaposition of colors. I wasn’t looking for what the picture is of: It was more like the golden mean, this otherworldly thing that ultimately can’t be taught. You have to find your way to it.” He goes on, “It reminds me of my dad, reaching for this lofty greatness. He didn’t want to just publish books; he wanted to create this thing that was up there [gesturing heavenward], this world with his heroes.”

Eggleston’s vision and mentorship, he says, shone a new light into his own mind and work. He remembers seeing a painting once by Vermeer — View of Delft — and being struck by the way the light suffuses the scene, how it bathes and animates everything. In a room full of fine old paintings, he had the sense that a spotlight was being shone on this one, luminous canvas — and, he says, “That spotlight is like what Bill’s work is for me.” (He also makes a point to note that their relationship likely would not have blossomed anywhere but Memphis: The “Mozart of photography,” as Foote calls him, was practically down the street, willing to open his door.)

Structure | Damage

I came to see the damage that was done and the treasures that prevail. — Adrienne Rich, “Diving Into the Wreck”

His arm recovered and his vision sharpened, Foote returned to New York, with a renewed sense of what his work could communicate. By 1995, his work was being shown in solo gallery shows in Memphis, then beyond. By 2000, a large-format art book, My Friend from Memphis, was published by Booth-Clibborn in London. A second, slimmer monograph followed in 2016, the previously mentioned Now Here Then, from Dashwood Books in New York. He’s continued creating and exhibiting at a steady clip; locally, he held a solo show of new work in late 2023 titled, “The Sun Inside the Evening.”

To peruse much of his work is to consider time and its (strangely beautiful) indignities. Foote has had a penchant, at least in moments of his life, for abusing his work after he creates it.

A little over a decade ago, while compiling some past work for his Now Here Then project and book, he started scanning “work prints” — not the original film, but less-than-perfect prints made for editing and placement purposes. These were outtakes that hadn’t been included in exhibitions or previous collections, and because the work prints had been boxed up with varying degrees of care, or lack thereof, they tended to be nicked, scratched, marred. Foote suddenly realized, he says, that “I had fallen in love with these things as-is. Some of them are more damaged than others. That one’s torn, and you can see the fibers or the paper under it. You’re seeing the medium and the process — it’s like you’re seeing time pass.”

In a photo of a friend, Angie (seen on the cover of this magazine), a young woman with deep-set eyes gazes into the middle distance — listening? Thinking? The photo is all shadow and grain, light and dark: The woman could almost be a reflection of herself in an antique mirror. Amid the shadows, the camera’s fixed on her ring, a knotted gold piece that glows inward. Foote explains that he was shooting film of his friends late into the night, until dawn, and using a special lens that allowed him to make just one detail sharp, in focus, while blurring everything else. The blur and grain give us the sense of an image rising up through the fog of memory. After the fact, the print acquired a landscape of creases and small tears; instead of seeing these marks as faults, Foote recognizes the way they enhance the beauty of the original.

Through the unintended ways the prints acquired damage, Foote is collaborating with time: There’s the original image, carefully composed — and then there’s whatever the vagaries of circumstance decided to inflict. “I think I walked around on some of these,” he says, and describes another “extreme example” of two prints of equal size that adhered together when a drink (“probably a bourbon and Coke”) spilled on them. He remembers filling a sink with water and soaking the prints, then peeling them apart, thinking all the while, “Oh, damn it: I like that picture.” But then he realized: “Look at what happens when I peeled them apart. Look at how beautiful that is.”

Interlude | Clouds

Two moments: Standing on the balcony of his childhood home, camera in hand, Huger Foote spots his mother supine on the grass below, staring up at the clouds or at nothing, Chesterfield in hand. He snaps a black-and-white photo of her, arms akimbo, knees tucked, amid lush Southern leaves. The woman in the image could be deep in thought, or out in space, or both; the photo is shot from above, so we’re clearly seeing through someone else’s eyes, yet as viewers, we’re immediately absorbed by the woman’s consciousness, floating down the river of her mind. The composition is different, and the postures, but the image puts me in mind of the John William Waterhouse painting The Lady of Shalott: a woman in pale cloth against a dark landscape, in a state of drift, floating to who-knows-where.

And: during the period after the carjacking, when Foote is learning what kind of artist he means to be, he goes over to Bill Eggleston’s one day and finds his mentor, camera in hand, lying in the yard, looking up at the sky. From the house, someone says, “‘Bill, you have a phone call,’” Foote recalls. “He says, ‘I can’t take it, I’m working.’” Eggleston would go on to produce, famously, an entire series of cloud photographs. But at that moment, it was pure revelation: This, too, could be one’s work. Could be art.

Memory | Momentary

Several days after we speak, Foote and I exchange emails about photos and family, memory and absence. I sense that he is, as I am, given to nostalgia and its vagaries — the skips in the tape of our lives, the loops back to a time half-forgotten, yet vivid. He mentions the opinion held by some that photographs rob us of our true memories, replacing them with artificially static, composed, still images. (In Camera Lucida, for instance, Roland Barthes writes of photographs of his mother: “Sometimes I recognized a region of her face, a certain relation of nose and forehead, the movement of her arms, her hands. I never recognized her except in fragments, which is to say that I missed her being, and that therefore I missed her altogether.”)

Foote sees the interplay between photography and memory through a slightly different lens. “I’m not sure I agree about this,” he goes on. “Images can also be touchstones, can trigger vivid dreams at night, proper time travel. 

“Then I think of making photographs now, if I am properly enthralled, consumed in the moment and a dance of seeking and finding order in the shapes and colors and light around me, my mind ceases thinking, escapes the confines of time.”

The process of creating photographs, when he is in that flow state, is just that: process, movement. It’s more verb than noun, more action than result (which isn’t to say he’s not meticulous about the results). But like anyone who continues doing something for a long time — Foote has been holding cameras for five decades or so — he’s drawn in by the state of being that photography crystallizes in him. He speaks of being “lost in the moment” while working, of “escaping my thinking mind for a while” — like meditation with his eyes open.

In the books collecting his work, I notice that the images are undated, unlocated, undescribed. They simply are, like flashbulb imprints on the retina, like the memories that appear again and again when we close our eyes. For the son of someone who spun out so, so many words, Huger Foote requires very few.

Coda

In a black-and-white photograph taken in his childhood home, a 12-year-old Huger Foote perches in an upholstered chair. His gaze is taut, intense; his mouth a straight line. The living room where he sits is formal, but he’s barefooted, and the sole of his left foot, propped jauntily on his right knee, is dark with dirt — he’s been running around outside, and from his striped T-shirt and sun-bleached hair, we know it’s summer in Memphis. Between his hands, poised at the ready: a camera.