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Thread: Great article on Eggleston

  1. #21

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    Great article on Eggleston

    "I'm afraid I'm one of those who thinks AAs work is technically perfect, but in the main, boring."



    I agree.that much of AA's work is a little stiff and unimaginative. On the other hand, his visual "content" is often dependant on subtle tonalities, which don't come across in books, but only in the original prints.



    "Egg tries to find beauty in a walk down the street..."



    I'm not sure that beauty is what attracts him. He seems preoccupied with things ordinary, unfortunate, and mildly repulsive.





    To each his own.

  2. #22

    Great article on Eggleston

    qt luong: my favorite eggleston monograph is "the democratic forest" it may need a few "listens", like one o f those new records that you don't like at first but after a while it "grows" on you (if you'll excuse the pun)...

  3. #23

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    Great article on Eggleston

    " His appeal is to a more visually sophisticated generation than ours."



    I am from that generation, and I know the work of other photographers of similar taste. They merely point a camera at something distasteful.



    The "visually sophisticated" audience reacts in kind: "Yo Dude - You've got to see this guys's stuff. It's like SO weird". To which I answer, in the "new" vernacular: "Yo Dude !".

  4. #24

    Great article on Eggleston

    This calls for much more sophisticated viewing than most of us old-timers are capable of -- presumably developed by growing up on TV and watching the quirky montage of current action movies.



    Isn't he also an "old timer"? I have not seen his prints in person, but what I have seen in the web, he lacks the HCB "definitive" moment and I thought the prints were rather ordinary in content.

  5. #25

    Great article on Eggleston

    Jorge, He really isn't well represented on the web apart from his older work. He's obsessive about his prints. he's bought up a lot of the old stock of the kodak dye transfer print materials so he can get the prints he likes (something which those who use amidol/azo should feel sympathy with I think!), although the Japanese stuff was lightjet and sumptious. He's not in the HCB mould and you won't find a decisive moment. There's an old pic of a girl in a green dress with a field in the background. Even though the bg and subject are in green, there is a tonal conflict set up.Its an essay in green at a time when art photographers weren't seeing in colour. The Japanese stuff is to die for. There's a pic of some flowers in a basket, (p147 of the retrospective catalogue) they move from white through to purple and every pink/red tone in between. there is a pink line of tiles in the lh bg which echoes one of the flower tones exactly. He does a similar trick with blues in a shot of some fish in a fish tank Ken, no one I've read commenting on Egg, or Egg's writing himself talks about 'weirdness', or adopts a dismissive 'yo dude' tone, one liners are easy but engaging with something you find difficult is much harder. I could recomend some books by Adorno or Gadamer (Gadamer's 'the relevance of the beautiful' in particular) which equate the ultimate artistic experience is when you struggle to find in meaning in a work you initially don't understand. Its the difference between 'entertainment' and 'art'. Wierdness implies that there is a 'normalcy' which we all subscribe to, instead of seeing the world as a complex place with an infinite number of viewpoints for the photographer to investigate.

  6. #26

    Great article on Eggleston

    often things which i find difficult or challenging are easy to dismiss as "rubbish" but i feel that it is a negative posture to adopt. but i find it worthwile (especially for a photographer with so many permutations to explore) to maintain an open attitude towards "different" work, it may require time and indeed may never come, but for me it's worth the effort to "see" new work.

    www.adriantyler.net

  7. #27
    tim atherton's Avatar
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    Great article on Eggleston

    QT

    there are a whole bunch of good links here on the Conscientious Photoweblog

    http://coincidences.typepad.com/

    including to his influence on film maklers etc.

    BTW - there are several photoweblogs I keep track of which regualry provide stimulating input...

    http://www.jmcolberg.com/weblog/

    http://www.circant.com/expose/

    http://punctum.typepad.com/

    etc
    You'd be amazed how small the demand is for pictures of trees... - Fred Astaire to Audrey Hepburn

    www.photo-muse.blogspot.com blog

  8. #28
    tim atherton's Avatar
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    Great article on Eggleston

    QT - Egglestons newish website - lots of info, including articles and forwards from his books etc

    http://egglestontrust.com/
    You'd be amazed how small the demand is for pictures of trees... - Fred Astaire to Audrey Hepburn

    www.photo-muse.blogspot.com blog

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