William Eggleston once said: “I don’t particularly like what’s around me”. Reflecting on these words, we may come to conclusion that the process of taking photographs could be regarded as an attempt to make peace with the hostile environment by capturing it in a subjective and personal way. He is an authentic portrayer of american spirit.
Eggleston's fascinating treatment of color is something he was both most praised and accused for, when he first entered the world of black-and-white dominated photography. “Eggleston’s use of color in his photographs is unspectacular, incidental. He uses it so subtly that we are no longer aware of it as a separate component of the process by which we perceive an object visually” (Knape 1999).
Some critics accused Eggleston of being totally indiscriminate when it came to the choice of subject matter. However, by his choice of seemingly accidental scenes he also “...introduced a new aesthetic, a new ‘democratic’ way of seeing through which the ordinary and banal become extraordinary and engrossing” (Knape 1999). Eggleston simply considers every object worthy of depiction, and this looks like a very healthy approach, because through his images he projects vivid and moody attitude onto places and objects we deal with on a daily basis. Eggleston is very talented at glorifying the mundane life, the very one we are striving to escape when we are looking at more glamorous photographs. And he puts us right back into this reality, showing that it's not so ugly and scary, after all.
Sources:
Gerard, V & Lempereur, L 2008, William Eggleston: Spirit of Dunkerque, Gingko Press, Corte Madera, CA
Knape, G 1999, William Eggleston: The Hasselblad Award 1998, Hasselblad Center, Sweden
I've always been interested in Eggleston's approach to photography. According to the short documentary on him, In The Real World, he only ever captures one frame of a scene. His method is one that has always stuck in my mind when I produce my own work. It certainly slows down the process and makes you really reflect on what you are capturing.
ReplyDeleteThanks for documentary reference, I'll add it to my watchlist :)
DeleteYeah I don't think I could ever switch to 'one frame of a scene' approach. I always take dozens of almost identical pictures of every single thing...I don't know if it's a blessing or a curse. But why not, since now everything is digital.
I have to agree with you on this Yana. However, I feel it helps my practice to try reduce the number of images I take in order to allow myself to spend more time the images I do take.
DeleteAlso the documentary is well worth watching!
It does seem to be something that every photographer who worked/works with film seems to lament about our generation – that an image doesn't seem to be that precious to us at the time – because we have 500 other bracketed images of the surrounding milliseconds. Sometimes I like to remind myself of when I had a film camera as a child with just one roll of film for an occasion – a holiday, school camp etc. How preciously each of those 24 (or 36 if i was lucky) images would be treated, set up, composed so as to not waste a single frame.
ReplyDeleteAnd then half of them would come back developed with my finger over the lens anyway, and now digital doesn't seem so bad