Has anyone read the Eggleston review in the New Yorker

I approach the New Yorker a little bit like I listen to sermons in church. Some weeks I skip altogether, other times I am enlightened, annoyed, or amused. Sometimes I am struck by a certain beauty without necessarily agreeing with anything. But when that Hirsch article comes along, I am reminded of what our "free" press is supposed to be doing.
 
Jesus, guys, are you nuts? That article is utterly straightforward. Peter Schjedahl is an excellent critic--I like him precisely because he doesn't obfuscate, and brings clarity to complex and subtle subjects. I don't see a single thing in there that's difficult to understand.

He’s an aesthete, not a propagandist. His great subject is the too-muchness of the real. He does regularly suppress one significant element of lived experience: time. His art re-proves Roland Barthes’s influential theory of the punctum—a Proustian quantum of lost time—as intrinsic to photography’s emotional power.
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Yes, that's exactly right. It's a succinct description of part of what makes Eggleston great. You don't need to have read Barthes to understand it, you just have to think about it for a second.

The New Yorker isn't pretentious. It's a general-interest magazine. Rise to the challenge, guys. It's not that difficult.
 
William Eggleston inherited the legacy of Walker Evans and Robert Frank's subject-focused photography and instead transformed it into photography-focused photography.

... And in doing so he unleashed the worst phase in photography history that continues to even today, trait boring bs pictures, saturated color photos, photography-for-photography's sake.

I can't stand his work but I like him as a dedicated practitioner of everything that I hate about contemporary photography.
 
mabelsound said:
Couldn't disagree more. But I certainly agree that he spawned some seriously lame imitators.

Anyway, I will go to this show in a few weeks, with any luck...
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His photos are about him. They're murals to his gigantic ego.

His not in the same tradition of courageous and concerned photography that moves us and makes us better people.
 
kevin m said:
As opposed to your gigantic ego?

You and Valdemar really need to lighten up with the "stone-tablet" pronouncements.
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Aw, c'mon. This is great! The internet is a giant stone tablet, but there's room on it for us all to write. Besides, one or two of your comments in this very thread smell to me like Grand Proclamations (not that there's anything wrong with that).

Back on topic: I happen to think that almost every photograph I take is a monument to my own ego.
 
mabelsound said:
EDIT: post removed, never mind, arguing online is bad for my health...
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mablesound, your post which you just deleted reminded me of one of the passages from Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

"FLEE, my friend, into thy solitude! I see thee deafened with the
noise of the great men, and stung all over with the stings of the
little ones.

Flee, my friend, into thy solitude- and thither, where a rough
strong breeze bloweth. It is not thy lot to be a fly-flap."

🙂
 
Open assignment for everyone who is so smart that they don't need big words:

Restate that sentence in words of two syllables or less, with no compound adjectives.

Please. I'd love to see it.

(Not that the writing isn't, maybe, a little florid... but come on.)
 
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