Here's a mini tour of some of the National Portrait Gallery's exhibited work.
http://www.npg.org.uk/whatson/eggleston/explore/curators-tour
His images can have a craze and a darkness. A few of them have attached-myths, not unlike D.Lynch productions.
thank you for this link !
admittedly, when it comes to photographers and their work, i am at the mercy of what others show me. i do not go on my own as often as i should
and seek things out, unless it happens to be a random chance, in other words, even in the threads where
people list the "top 10 contemporary photographers " about 8 out of 10 i have no clue
who they are ... i am familiar with the work of crewdson, and i was weened on films by david lynch, music
by artists on 4AD records ( and their cover art ) so i am a bit myopic not being
that much of a hunter and gatherer type. the images / walkthrough in the gallery really show how he was as
addicted to making photographic images as winograd and others ( maybe you and me too ) are/ have been
and gives more of a global look at his work. to be honest i only knew of his streetscapes and other so called
boring-work ... it made me smile when the lecturer mentioned him trimming down surveillance film and cutting
sprocket holes so he could use it, he ( the presenter ) obviously hasn't been on apug or other websites
( sub club &c ) where people do this sort of thing as often as they butter toast
...
I think you got the right definition as it is an objective one.
For Eggleston's work, I am neutral. This is not my kind of picture but I understand the intent. People are
pissed off because these pictures go against their belief of what is "good" photography: Subject ordinariness,
(lack of apparent) composition, a certain kind of ugliness, etc... So what?
i think you hit on part of it dali -
it was posted earlier in this thread, the non-sanitized view of the world, showing the uglyness of what might
be around is .. and sometimes people complain in photography forums about the trend of
photographers to show ugly, not beauty. sure there is a lot of beauty in the world, but
there is a lot of not so beautiful as well ...
for a long time ( painting and ) photography was about archetypes i think. epic battles, portraits of royalty
and rich people portrayed the way they wanted to be remembered
formal in every aspect of it. then in the late 1800s when global hell broke lose and anyone could pretty much
do anything there were no rules anymore. its funny, people often complain about dadaism, but
as someone famous these days might say : it happened way before that, and a lot of people were not happy... believe me ...
painting kind of went off the deep end, and photography became something anyone could do,
whlle still concentrated on universal archetypes, beauty, and maybe epic moments in their own lives,
some showed showed the uglyness of humanity
and the world was no longer encapsulated in a myth. even the civil war photographs of brady were
"arranged", like the crime scenes of weegee. atget showed gypsies and the poor in his documentary images
of
paris as jacob riis showed slums and kids missing fingers working in factories. the difference with some of
eggelston's images is they are color and they, except for the vivid color, are brought out of
the abstract into the everyday. IDK maybe i m just rambling but i see some of his imagery in twin peaks,
and crewdson and american beauty and other " the dark underbelly of every day americana " almost like
the hyper-realness of watching jerry springer and maybe seeing that your neighbor goes to a "vomitorium"
or the recent opra tapes submitted to the us congress. it all has a surrealness to it. I'm not sure how staged eggelston's work was. from the little i have seen
it seems that he was always a fly on the wall, which makes it even more surreal and an every day reality
that people don't really want to deal with. these days reality seems to be a reality show, privacy is gone, everybody
is babbling about their most intimate thoughts and desires on youtube, and Facebook and their blogs, not to
mention when we walk outside we are trapped by stuff that people don't want to see ... forclosed houses,
streetscapes in disrepair, and homeless guy holding a sign that says " homeless vet, sober, will work for food god bless"
on the street corner that really wants to make eye contact with when they are at a stop light ..