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.