Eggleston slideshow on lensculture - "banal bcomes menacing"

Lounge
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In case that happens, I’m watching this thread. Thanks in advance.
Not sure if Eggleston could be considered an expressionist like the painter Edvard Munch or like Karl Schmidt-Rottluf (for those wonderful saturated colors), or even like the photographer Aaron Siskind or like Harry Callahan, who use color more sparingly, but the subjectivity and unsettling nature of some of his work seems to say so; and that ceiling sure is red. I get the urge to call my electrician every time I see it.

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I’ll have a think and see what I can come up with! Elle’s choice was good for many reasons, it’s a tough benchmark :smile:

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Following The Scream and the red ceiling, there is this :slightly_smiling_face:
https://www.dpreview.com/challenges/Entry.aspx?ID=1058838

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Hmm, on the one hand I really like old industrial buildings, and I like looking at photographs of old industrial buildings, many of them are very beautiful. On the other hand, the couple of Becher photographs that I’ve seen are boring, sorry, I don’t claim to have refined aesthetic sensibilities!

I watched the Tate video for Eggleston’s exhibit, and that video made his work seem much more accessible. But there was no hint of menace, so I’m still wondering which of his photographs are supposed to carry an undertone of menace.

Trying to place the Eggleston images in the Tate exhibit into some sort of context, my first thought was of commissioned photographers during the Great Depression, which raises the question of outsiders taking photographs (and perhaps Eggleston was not an outsider w.r.t. to the people and places he photographed), and more outsiders viewing the photographs and perhaps coming to conclusions that might be completely different from the viewpoints of the people being photographed. For example this article regarding a series of Walker Evans’ photographs:

The Most Famous Story We Never Told
http://archive.fortune.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2005/09/19/8272885/index.htm

And of course Dorothea Lange’s “Migrant Mother”, where the “insider” and “outsider” views are so very divergent:

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The Bechers used a 3x3 “grid” and similar grids to display several photographs at once of buildings with same functionality and so almost necessarily similar design, taken from different places and times. They worked with large format cameras (8" x 10") and presumably each individual print in the grid is fairly large, well, at least 8" x 10".

On a computer screen, I don’t think there is any way to “see” such a 3x3 grid of individual 8" x 10" images in a way that’s even remotely close to what the actual grid of images might look like when displayed on a physical wall, unless the screen is huge. But even if I were looking at the images in a museum, I think I’d have a lot of trouble “seeing” the individual images arranged in a grid. If the images were presented horizontally, one at a time, all at an easy viewing height, that would make them easier to see and appreciate.

Anyway, I used Google’s image search to find some additional (and relatively larger-sized) images. Here are some links:

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A lot of emphasis has been given in various publications to the idea of photographs telling stories, and of course they often do. Lange and Evans were trying to document life under particular sets of harsh conditions. The Bechers’s photographs document the existence of old industrial buildings, old and empty, deteriorating and being torn down, but with their own historical and aesthetic value, and their photographs were instrumental in getting historic industrial buildings preserved instead of razed to the ground.

Eggleston’s images are “serial” in the sense of being taken over specific time frames and locations, and sometimes in the context of specific events. But was he actually intending to tell a story? If so, what’s the story he was telling? Or was his capturing of glimpses of a particular time and place secondary to some other artistic intention?

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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…

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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.

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Here the similarities are so funny!

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I can’t stop myself from seeing animation. Like frames in a cartoon.

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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.

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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?

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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 :slight_smile: 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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Too deep for me, peeps! Anyway here’s a pic I took a few days ago, could it be a bit Eggleston?!..

Pavillion
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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 :slight_smile:

Regards

Phil

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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?

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 :wink::wink:

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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 :slight_smile: