Alec Soth on William Eggleston

[Alan Edward Klein]

I think he meant this:

Very scrumptious-looking pastries.

 

[Alex Benjamin]

Very scrumptious-looking pastries.

You have to put your Manet where your mouth is.

 

[awty]

Its refreshing to have someone that doesn't YELL at you.

 

[Alex Benjamin]

Another good one. Chauncey Hare was new to me, but the find is in The San Quentin Project. Ordered the book as soon as I finished watching the video. Both brilliant and moving.

 

[sasah zib]

returning to the forest
Introduction to The Democratic Forest
by Eudora Welty

The Democratic Forest, a most remarkable and beautiful book, is what is even rarer, and original one. Consisting entirely of the eloquent photographs of the American photographer William Eggleston, it begins as an autobiography might, with a setting for a life.

The opening photograph shows us a quiet and cared-for breadth of meadow, field and pastureland, set back at an easeful distance from its road, led to through a line of wide-spaced trees in the leafing spring of the year, protected on the upper side by an arm of the old forest. A sentinel shade tree stands beside the open-doored barn. The caption reads: 'Early spring at Mayfair, my family plantation in Sunflower County.' The place has been photographed in its tender rural colours. No one is in view.

Indeed, Mr. Eggleston's masterly photographs of places draw their strength and their significance from his never losing his own very acute sight of the human factor. The human being--the perpetrator of or the victim or the abandoner of what we see before us--is the reason why these photographs of place have their power to move and disturb us; they always let us know that the human being is the reason they were made.

He has photographed every tell-tale thing we leave behind us, from leaking oil to spilled Coca-Cola. He has looked up and caught the emanations of the Great Smoky Mountains, and a mist very like a ghost that appears to be drifting over a graveyard and near Oxford, Mississippi. In photographing ivy crowding over a wall, in commotion as lively as a townful of Breughel peasants, he has got a picture of a country breeze. He moves his camera close upon a great worldly peony; our glimpse into that is as good as a visit: a bloom so full-open and spacious that we could all but enter it, sit down inside and be served tea. It was photographed, according to the caption, on the Boston Common across from the Ritz Hotel--which is the next thing to photographing an analogy. In effect, he can lay our own hand on texture and substance. He puts between our finger and thumb the slipperiness of a leaf only in that moment coming out on the budding tree. Indeed, this is what his skill performs: it makes what it shows accessible.

who is Eudora?
"Why I Live at the P.O." is a short story written by Eudora Welty (April 13, 1909 – July 23, 2001), American writer and photographer. It was published in her collection of stories named A Curtain of Green (1941).[1] The work was inspired by a photograph taken by Welty that depicts a woman ironing at the back of a post office. The story is classified as an example of Southern realism. "Why I Live at the P.O." is one of Welty's most popular and frequently anthologized stories

 

[MTGseattle]

I too enjoy Alec Soth's videos. I love the random photographic ephemera he's collected over the years. I hadn't thought much regarding W Eggleston's work since college. I recently flipped through Guide again and cannot understand what all the fuss is about. I'll watch Mr. Soth's video and see if that informs my opinion in one way or the other.