"I'm at war with the obvious"

[Nh3]

I think the above quote by William Eggleston is one of the most profound statements in all of photography.

To me it means don't photograph what you feel you should photograph - the obvious, the decisive moment, the peak action, the storytelling shot.

But once you stop photographing "the obvious" then you hit a brick wall and if you find a way around it then you have matured as a photographer.

... I'm off to find a way around this damn wall!

 

[squirrel$$$bandit]

The thing about Eggleston is, he photographs a lot of ordinary things--stuff you'd walk by every day. But he makes them seem alien. He's a master recontextualizer. Things that are right in front of you, that you can't see, he does.

 

[mhv]

I love Eggleston, and I wished I had made up that sentence myself.

It bothers me to no end when people lump him into a "photography of the banal" or a "snapshot aesthetics" definition, because, as mabelsound said, he is a master at recontextualizing.

One the one hand, his quote can mean that he is avoiding the usual clichés of photography, but on the other hand, it can also mean that he is photographing aggressively what we consider the obvious, the common because he can show us that it is not banal.

It's interesting to compare him with Martin Parr, for example. Parr also deals with the "ordinary life" and the banal, but he really aims for the money shot, and the juicy, gross underbelly of everyday life. He has tabloid humour written all over his work. Eggleston doesn't reach for that. He goes for very subtle moods, states of minds.

For that, I keep going back to his pictures because they are not reducible to words. Modern art photography is geared toward making tableaux with very definite lines of reasoning, social commentary, or art historical reference. I don't want to call Eggleston a naïf, but he goes for something much more intuitive. At its worst, he has at least exciting compositions; at its best, he gives you the impression that he found something about the way the human mind works, but he can only tell it to you by showing it for you to experience, not writing it down to explain it to you.

 

[squirrel$$$bandit]

He's definitely not a naif, but he has the ability to jettison a lot of the artful self-consciousness that burden some other photographers, painters, writers, etc. That quote is actually from a much longer one...here's the rest...

I am afraid that there are more people than I can imagine who can go no further than appreciating a picture that is a rectangle with an object in the middle of it, which they can identify. They don't care what is around the object as long as nothing interferes with the object itself, right in the center. Even after the lessons of Winogrand and Friedlander, they don't get it. They respect their work because they are told by respectable institutions that they are important artists, but what they really want to see is a picture with a figure or an object in the middle of it. They want something obvious. the blindness is apparent when someone lets slip the word "snapshot." Ignorance can always be covered by "snapshot." the word has never had any meaning. I am at war with the obvious.

Even other photographers I really, really like succumb to the kind of sentimentality Eggleston is talking about. Sometimes that sentimentality is really skillful and enojyable (Elliot Erwitt eg) but Eggleston is really a rigorous, really white-hot pure artist. It's not the only way to be, but I admire it.

You've seen that documentary about him? He only takes one shot of a thing. That's it, just one. Then he takes a picture of something else.

 

[mhv]

You've seen that documentary about him? He only takes one shot of a thing. That's it, just one. Then he takes a picture of something else.

I saw both 🙂

There's Eggleston in the Real World, and By The Ways.

Both documentaries are equally fascinating and dreadful. Fascinating because the first one gives you lots of interesting background, archive pictures, interviews with people, and shots of WE at work; the second one cares a lot about the art of Eggleston, and its apparent artlessness.

Dreadful, in the case of the first one, because the documentarist is a whiner who has self-confidence issues and wish he could be The Man instead of his own sorry self; in the case of the other one because it was made by French filmmakers who confuse being nebulous with being evocative!

I really like the one shot mentality of Eggleston. Either you get something or you don't. And it makes editing so much easier! People are over-precious about their photos. They bracket, double, triple shots to have belt and suspenders security. That practice is useful in all sorts of tense situations, but for the kind of handheld, peripatetic photography that Eggleston and most amateurs do, one shot is usually enough.

 

[squirrel$$$bandit]

I really like the one shot mentality of Eggleston. Either you get something or you don't. And it makes editing so much easier! People are over-precious about their photos. They bracket, double, triple shots to have belt and suspenders security. That practice is useful in all sorts of tense situations, but for the kind of handheld, peripatetic photography that Eggleston and most amateurs do, one shot is usually enough.

Agreed! And I quite liked the first movie, in spite of the narration/framing. The second I haven't seen, thanks for the tip!

 

[f/stopblues]

I don't have much to contribute at the moment cause I'm at work (tending to the drug needs of nicu babies!) and my brain is otherwise occupied.

Just wanted to send some love for the thread 😀 I'm enjoying it! I'll come back and throw my hat in the ring when I get home later.

 

[Leighgion]

My impression of Eggleston isn't that he feels photographers shouldn't photograph the "obvious," but only that it's not what he wants to do with his photography.

I read an interview where Eggleston talks about how Ansel Adams and Edward Weston were the only major art photographers when he was starting out, but that their style didn't interest him so he didn't follow. He also mentions finding some appeal in Cartier-Bresson, but that Bresson's decisive moments leaned into photojournalism, which again wasn't what Eggleston was looking for so again he didn't really follow.

I don't think any photographer can be called "mature" if they say their way is the only way to be a good photographer, and I don't get this out of Eggleston at all. He's come off quite mature about the fact other known photographers are quite different from him.