Well, for me, the title “Democratic Forest” sets the context. My wife and I have had the opportunity to travel a bit, and for me the most fascination comes from the getting to the attractions, driving through the country, seeing how people live and strive to thrive. Countries start to take on personalities that way, seeing how folks organize their lives.
The US doesn’t have a distinct personality, in that way, although you can start to see specific characteristics by state or region. A lot of people have come to the US to live from a lot of places, bringing their own needs, priorities and values to how they organize their lives. The amalgam can look cluttered, disjoint, and downright goofy at times. But there it is, the “Democratic Forest”, well, to bear-of-little-brain here…
My reading of the Bechers and their followers is that the blank manner of the photography sort of alienates the scene in such a way that you can really “see” it. You can start looking at things with your eyes. Something important for designers and artists. You can also look everywhere in the photo, there is a sort of sameness of the surface due to the framing and perspective.
I’ve seen several exhibitions but think I actually prefer the books as you can study things more carefully. The repetition is another device that in addition to the framing makes you see. Whenever I look at a series of theirs I’m always visually impressed by the abstract form but also amazed by the things people have built and the histories behind. I mentioned a similar oscillation in Egglestons work. But with the Bechers it’s the form of the subject that fascinates not the composition or the moment. Saying that the framing and repetition is critical to being able to see properly but the photography quickly becomes transparent and you start thinking about the subject.
I think “story” is a bit of a dangerous word in this context. Sometimes as @Elle mentions the story is important but it can also turn into a bit of a sales pitch. Reducing the potential of the photo into a bite size suitable for quick consumption. Art photography I believe must reverberate beyond this.
This one is so hard to make sense of. Unusual tight crop and “senseless” shapes. But lovely to look at.
The Bechers I don’t know about you but I actually get a déjà vu of old screensavers, of the morphing and moving shapes. I was mesmerized by their hypnotic variations.
My brain keeps wanting to form letter shapes in that last image. I can’t stop scanning over the whole series trying to pull out a word or message (no matter how hard I try).
Actually, “Anthropocene” has a quite distinct and very different meaning than this. I should know, as I have an article in the journal “Anthropocene,” and have a very active research profile in that field. I’m also teaching a class on Anthropocene landscape dynamics this semester.
When I encountered the term, I knew I had to look it up first but decided to comment mostly about banal and menace because it seemed like what everyone was talking about.
I think I get it now:
I’d read Anthropocene to mean, very colloquially, the way we’re doing things now in terms of sustainability for the future. In that lens, the banal, that is, the every day things we do become a threat because they are unsustainable. Eggleston’s work, then, are documents of this unsustainability, and in some ways a projection to the future: the lack of people, the ghostly feel, the dichotomy of the calm and intense color pallets.
Replying to the very first post and following the link to the book and selected images, I tend to agree with @Elle . There seems to be a bit of “emperor’s clothes” about the images. Yes he uses colour in a good way, but none of the images strike me as anything special. I like the image with the Kodak shop and the McDonalds sign as it is vibrant and to me (a Brit) it sort of captures an image of America that we saw on TV back in the day.
Maybe it is because I am a Brit I don’t get it !
Maybe I am just judging the guy on a few shots from the book and need to look deeper.
I do love street photography and I do love an image that portrays a bit of social history.
Regarding the possibility that the emperor has no clothes, I’m still trying to figure out the image choices for the lensculture slide show (link in first post to this thread). I’m particularly curious about these two images and wonder if anyone has any thoughts?
Image 9, blue picnic table, with an out-of-focus red (Coca-Cola?) drink cup sitting on the ground in the background.
Image 10, speckled formica counter with a green sink. At first I thought this was a kitchen, but on closer inspection I think it’s actually outside someone’s house, maybe in an open-sided carport?
This article focusses on Eggleston’s influence on film (snippet from article: “the magic and terror, the beauty and horror that is latent in the everyday”):
The documentary film mentioned in the above two links follows Eggleston around during a day’s shooting:
In the following video interview, Eggleston does acknowledge a couple of motivating factors, and also mentions that often he doesn’t even look through the viewfinder:
I think the thumbnails in the following article are from the original 1976 Eggleson exhibit - sadly, the larger photographs to which the thumbnails probably originally linked don’t seem to be available:
The New York MOMA republished the original museum guide as a book (William Eggleston’s Guide / essay by John Szarkowski, New York : Museum of Modern Art ; Cambridge, Mass. : distributed by the MIT Press, 1976 ). I seem to be “tone deaf” to the “beauty/terror/menace/etc” that other people see in Eggleston’s images, so I requested the “Guide” from our local library system. Maybe seeing the original images from that first MOMA exhibit - if indeed there are any photographs in the “Guide” - might shed some light. It seems to me that the first thumbnail from the Slate magazine article (last link above) seems to have some Munch-like overtones, though it’s hard to tell from a thumbnail.
y’know, it occurs to me to ask, could it be that Eggleston’s images attracted attention at the time just because they were in color? I did some additional reading this afternoon, and it appears that was quite controversial in the art world. I’ve been going through old family snapshots recently, and back in the day good color was hard to do without laborious camera and darkroom technique, definitely not evident in the old images I’m looking at. Didn’t matter the subjects were ‘banal’, they were in vivid color. All the “beauty/terror/menace” prose seems to be critics trying to squeeze blood from the emotion turnip.
If you clone out the pick-up truck and make sky match the color of the door together with matching the color of the path (on the grass to that of the wall, it will be a better approximation
When I was reading about his work the other day, I came across a video saying how he used a dye transfer process to make the prints. Sounded quite tricky but the benefit was he got vivid colours.
Raw Convert’s image is a definite Eggleston emulating contender:) Like to
see it printed with Eggleston’s dye process. Some of Eggleston’s photos
resonate with me and some not so much–like other photographer’s images.
The white dog in the car window is a favorite. The tricycle is not–even
though it is somehow striking in its desolation.
Yes, I think we take ‘good color’ for granted these days, but in the film days of yore, you got different interpretations of color depending on your film selection. I could almost always pick out Ektachrome from Kodachrome images; these days, you have to be a lot more perceptive about such to distinguish Nikon-Canon-Fuji-etc…
Oh yes, it’s color gone crazy now. Once, you’d leave the house with a batch of film–usually one or two kinds and there weren’t that many choices–Ektachrome on a dull day and Kodachrome when the sun shined. Now, we’re bracketing film simulations or converting RAW to whatever we want. The limitations of film imposed a certain discipline just as charcoal on paper do. Now similarly, I download Krita, I can draw or paint anything I want, but what? It seems to take a different form of discipline to produce something worthwhile, or to even begin.
duplicated the original layer twice, the top layer blend mode changed to MULITPLY. Put a layer mask on that layer and blended using the Gradient tool up to the base of of the building.
Cropped to taste.
Selected the white pick-up truck by lasso tool and filled with white color and removed the selection. So now I have a white patch instead of truck. Opened GMIC Qt and used Inpaint[patch] (with white color mask) with default values.
Used clone tool with low opacity to clean up Inpaint work.
Used Interactive Color Mask of GMIC to select the grass and exported the mask as New active layer. Used eraser tool to remove everything except the front lawn.
but decided to comment mostly about banal and menace because it seemed like what everyone was talking about.
