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).
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You too, eh?
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
That’s my two 'penneth (two cents)
A good thread to read though 
Regards
Phil
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?
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Image 9, blue picnic table, with an out-of-focus red (Coca-Cola?) drink cup sitting on the ground in the background.
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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?
Regarding why Eggleston took the pictures that he took, this article mentions “The still-hobbled American South . . . . shards that suggest a broken past, a tormented present, a weird future”:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/31/movies/a-look-at-the-south-through-a-lens-truly.html
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:
http://dougaitkenthesource.com/william-eggleston
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.
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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.
Oh, that’s probably an obtuse metaphor… Wikipedia:You can't squeeze blood from a turnip - Wikipedia
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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 
thanks for all the additional information @Elle.
I will take a read when I am home tonight.
Funny how he appears to be a pioneer of colour, yet many of us , myself included are eager to activate the mono conversion tools on our photo editing.
Have a lovely Friday and nice weekend
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.
Thanks, interesting idea. (Though I don’t think I have anything much with which to clone away the truck)
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.
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Here is a quick try using GIMP!!
Here is Before Image
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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.
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Cropped to taste.
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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.
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Used clone tool with low opacity to clean up Inpaint work.
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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.
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Improved the color of the lawn to taste.
Done in about ten minutes.
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Very good! I’m impressed. It’s got a lot of presence.
? The next step is to make the graffiti face the same colour as the orange at the end of the grey strip!
@RawConvert, No no. I feel that if there are two many points emphasized, then the photo loses its focus. For me, it’s the little patch of blue door and its similarity to the sky that makes the picture. The darkening of the bund behind the building and colorfullness of the grass in front accentuates the point.
The final touch will be to call this photo Blue Door instead of pavillion. Now the viewer has no choice to but to see the door
Perusing reddit when this was posted and immediately thought of this thread!
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