Re: [Leica] Eggleston cameras

[Alexey Merz <alexey@webcom.com>]

John Collier <jbcollier@home.com> wrote:
>Colour photography is a very difficult expressive medium 
>as colours have strong psychological effects and popular 
>colour preferences are constantly shifting. These factors 
>tended to overwhelm the subject and the artist. For
>years no one thought serious colour work was possible. 
>Eggleston changed that.

Not only Eggleston though! Sheila Metzner; Irivng Penn;
Susan Meiselas; William Albert Allard; Ernst Haas; 
Lennart Nilsson; Rosamond Wolff Purcell; Lucas Samaras
...to name just a nonrepresentative few photographers 
whose color images have influenced the way that I see 
the world, for better and worse.

As Paul Chefurka put it so well, it's not as though 
color is a new problem in the visual arts. And I'm 
unconvinced that the problem was any more a lack of 
photographers willing & able to tackle color than 
it was a lack of critical viewers able to decide 
what might qualify as artistic color photography.

None of this is to cast aspersions on Eggleston's work.
I'm undecided and a bit ambivalent about it. I certainly
don't buy that you always have to 'just get it' first 
try. And I'm certainly not going to decide on the basis
of a half dozen lo-res pictures on the Web.

It took some years of trying before I started to
understand what Atget was doing and to like it. I never 
liked Arbus at all, but then about two years ago I saw a
couple of her prints at SF MOMA, and they literally took
my breath away. So I agree that visual art need not be
accessible and that it has different purposes. But as 
art becomes more inaccessible it is at increasingly great 
risk of being irrelevant or, worse, a sham.

Alexey Merz