[Leica] Re: Eggleston

[Mitch Alland <malland@mac.com>]

David Rodgers:

You must be throwing a lot of great pictures into the trash! Perhaps this is an important point about Eggleston. He's very difficult to imitate just because he makes art of the most ordinary scenes. Looking at his photography, I am always striken by the thought, "Why is this a photograph?" In a way Eggleston is like Hemingway, extremely easy to imitate superficially but almost impossible to equal. Also, like Hemingway, he got there first.

Someone in this thread wrote how much he hated Eggleston and loved Karsh. To me Karsh is a hack. Yes, he has made some good portraits like the famous one of Churchill. But his books contain mainly dramitically-lit pedestrian photos of celebrities. And the hands...he obviously hit on the idea that hands are expressive, and as you go through his books, you see the hands of his sitters all over the place in all sorts of twisted and artificially posed positions. There are good reasons why Walker Evans ridiculed celebrity portraits in general and didn't want to do any. To me Karsh ain't art. On the other hand, I don't like Cindy Sherman who's also come up in this thread. And you don't have to like Eggleston.

This discussion reminds me of a course that I took in my last year in college, called something like "Design in the Vsiual Arts" taught by Sekler, a highly articulate professor. After the course was over, I had a long conversation with Sekler who told me that every year he gave the same final exam: he projected slides of two abstract paintings next to each other and asked the students which was a better painting and why. One of the paintings obviously was exacrable and the other obviously was good. He said that it was depressing because each year some three-quarters of the students chose the execrable painting as the better one, largely because it had many of the elements of design that he had taught; for example, blue "recedes" and red "comes forward." Hence, the students found it easy to write about the bad painting. Sekler also thought that the feeling for form and design is largely hard-wired in people and, while you could make people more aware of it, there was an element that either was there or wasn't, that couldn't be taught. Therefore, it may not be surprising that possibly most people prefer kitsch and schlock to art.

- --Mitch

Date: Wed, 16 Feb 2000 10:35:23 -0800
>From: drodgers@nextlink.com
>Subject: [Leica] Re: Eggleston
>
>Jim
>
>>>Putting film in the camera was his first mistake.<<
>
>http://www.masters-of-photography.com/E/eggleston/eggleston_greenville.html
>
> When I first looked at this photograph yesterday it didn't do much for me.
>Then I started reading comments on the lug and I kept going back to it. Now
>I can't get it out of my head.
>
>It's possible Eggleston was just driving down the road when he decided to
>test the shutter on his camera. Or perhaps there's a deeper meaning that
>escapes me. In any event, it's a nice photograph. I'd love to be out
>driving on a country road on a sunny day right now. That photo took me on a
>(very brief) little journey.
>
>OTOH, I agree with Tina. If it was my photograph it would have ended up in
>the round file. The lesson may be that I'm too critical of my
>own work.
>
>David