let us now catalogue famous people

hey so i saw that exhibition
it was okay
i didn't know it was there & to stroll in had that kind of unscheduled eye test vibe that seeing eggleston prints always has. they picked some really good stuff but it had a couple of the dare-i-say-flaws that chromes, say, has, just including a little more of the explicit southern documentary stuff, a cool sign that says MELONS or JOE'S BBQ or whatever, which is just slightly less complicated than so much of his stuff.

http://i.imgur.com/5oeSVKd.jpg http://i.imgur.com/8eGjp6g.jpg

i otherwise thought photography at tate modern kinda sucked though? they exhibited some things upstairs that were too small, & there was a harry callahan exhibition that was only okay. like almost just like they didn't get it. everything the new moma guy is saying, about separating photography from that kinda super-chronological technical aspect, messily juxtaposing it against other media, sounds really neat to me so far. i'd like to see his first show.

just kinda on the same subject: those books that came out are just the greatest. i don't have them but got to just stare hard at them in a couple of different libraries, had chromes on loan for awhile. & the more eggleston i see the more i think the '80s & '90s are just this totally on-point era that's weirdly out of sight, maybe for not having as much of the ~cadillac~/beehive/diner kind of work that the earlier work has. like i love that thing he said about paris, that it was his first truly modern book. i was looking through the book that came out of just various work from the faulkner book & other stuff, when he won the hassleblad award, & it's just so strong, so surprising, each shot so apart from the predictable ground you'd think somebody would be treading by having done ostensibly similar work for a long time.

http://i.imgur.com/Z7QVw9p.jpg

btw democratic forest: the r3mix is out this year apparently

paris is probably my favorite eggleston. the colors are so far from what he normally does, so much purple, pink, and blue, and the framing is very very on-point.

http://i.imgur.com/Q12iGue.png

the drawings are really great. I'd love to see more of them.

yeah they're so beautiful
a bunch are in the aperture article from which ^ this ^ is excerpted, though i forget if any are different from the book
there's another aperture ish with some just lab prints of pics eggleston shot in iirc mexico. they're really interesting to see, eggleston sans dye.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/streetshooter45/7286214580/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/streetshooter45/7294248894/

Always love pictures of Garry

Via Shooting Wide Open

http://www.julianneswartz.com/work_archive/photography/placements.php

http://i.imgur.com/GhZixfi.jpg

Aw, Garry. :)

Those Eggleston multi-volumes by Steidl (Chromes & Los Alamos) are so wonderful, NOT too much of a good thing IMO (but they have to be ingested slowly, like a rich feast, I never go through more than one volume per day). Impatiently yearning for Democratic Forest (yep supposedly this year)... and we get Election Eve in 2016, yay.

No photographer gives me as much sheer pleasure as Eggleston-- inexhaustible, for me. Looking at his stuff actually makes me feel drunk/ stoned, cognitively high. Agree w/ schlump, his later stuff just as good, always surprising.

Heh at Tate guy's vapid commentary, and yet, poor guy... it really is difficult (isn't it?) to speak/ write intelligently, insightfully about Eggleston. Difficult to find intelligent/ insightful commentary on his photography... on what makes it Eggleston.

Take e.g. Szarkowski, I love Szarkowski, that's a great well-written essay which introduces William Eggleston's Guide. Yes some of it's OTM but IMO much of it is totally off; in the end its characterization seems to me not so much about Eggleston (per se, or as a whole) but rather a narrow sliver/ selection/ interpretation of Eggleston: i.e., it's about the Szarkowski-curated Guide. (So, focus on the local/ Southern/ family angle-- things that are easier to talk about, just as they are for Tate curator.) Don't get me wrong, it's a wonderful selection/ curation, but that introduction misses so many dimensions of Eggleston. Dimensions that are in those photographs too, but not as obvious as in other works (e.g. Los Alamos).

Yet I feel foolish criticizing Szarkowski (or any other commentator on Eggleston), because I hardly feel equipped to articulate in words what I see in Eggleston, either.

It's interesting that maybe some of the best "commentary" hasn't come from written analysis, but artwork he's influenced, especially (motion picture) film. For example, I think modern critics on Eggleston now see/ recognize qualities in Eggleston (qualities e.g. Szarkowski didn't really see), that critics first saw/ recognized in (say) David Lynch-- then saw the Eggleston in Lynch, then recognized that quality in Eggleston. So the first to *see* that quality wasn't a critic but an Eggleston-loving, Eggleston-inspired artist. It's like, later art functions as a portal for critics to better see/ understand certain qualities of earlier art (especially original/ atypical/ not already critically conceptualized & categorizable qualities), which later artist was inspired by. Does that make sense?

Which, on the other hand, makes some modern commentary on Eggleston sound like it's more about Lynch than Eggleston. But I'll still take that over another round of Tate guy's "old/ new Southern" thing.

For photography criticism to "get" Eggleston (or find a way to talk about him), it helps to think of other media, like film, of course painting-- and maybe music, too.

Yeah - I tuned out at the Tate guy after he mentioned the (apocryphal) legend that Eggleston only ever takes one picture of any subject. I think that's a myth Eggleston likes to perpetuate himself, but I definitely recall that it's wrong...

To me the most astonishing quality about Eggleston is that, despite the legend that's grown around him, despite the fact that he's often the entry-point for many 'hipsters' & c into photography-as-art (although I feel like Stephen Shore is the other and his share is growing), his work absolutely lives up to everything that's been written about it and more... it's like you want to slag him for being the guy who made color-photography into a serious art form, surely there have been better practitioners to come after in the same way that I'd rate 100000 bands over the Beatles, but it's as if I'm one of those Beatles partisans who literally believes nothing could ever eclipse the Beatles...and I do think that's where I stand on Eggleston

You know, you make the connection between Eggleston and Lynch visually and though I had never thought about it I can immediately make the connection, it seems so obvious now? (insert that famous photo of Lynch / Eggleston)

http://i.imgur.com/zof3XEY.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/X2k1Ocx.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/6ygMXqR.jpg

Just... had an urge to see these two images

They're not all here but this is probably my favorite Eggleston work, 14 Pictures

http://www.egglestontrust.com/14_pictures.html

I can't find any mention of this connection anywhere, but the "Lynch-Frost Productions" logo which ends episodes of Twin Peaks--

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UdOWzq2jPhk

-- has always reminded me of Eggleston's photograph of the open black oven:

http://www.brianrose.com/journal/eggleston_oven.jpg

IMO, that has to be an homage.

Directors who've explicitly cited Eggleston's influence-- Wenders, Van Sant, Sofia Coppola, Korine; case can be made for Malick, Wong Kar Wai/ Christopher Doyle, the Coen brothers, many others. (The other day happened upon Blood Simple on TV; saw so much Eggleston in it-- like, struck by specific shots that directly reminded me of specific Eggleston photographs.)

Of course, once you start looking you (I) see Eggleston everywhere, maybe fallaciously; but he's permeated so much of contemporary visual culture, in large part through the photographers, directors, cinematographers he's influenced. (Can't help seeing him in "True Detective" too.)

And yet, for all that, he maintains his ineffaceable difference/ distinctiveness, the idiosyncrasy, the uniqueness of his aesthetic sensibility. For all his influence, all the things one sees now as "Egglestonian," he's SO NOT replicable. People copy so much about his photographs (often only the most extrinsic of qualities, like: oh here's a picture of an old American car), but no one else in the world has that eye... or something more primordial than the "eye."

http://i.imgur.com/r9Apyao.jpg

Phenomenal high-keyed B&W from Adams

That's great.

http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/03/18/an-inside-view-of-arab-photography/

http://i.imgur.com/ex7EuWw.jpg

From IH

http://37.media.tumblr.com/c0e7ed2812f8376aa737874c1aee7683/tumblr_n39oriUGKo1qb6mm9o1_1280.jpg

http://24.media.tumblr.com/9431745e88249548163e96c5dc06354d/tumblr_n384mjNgUe1qb6mm9o1_1280.jpg

nice recent vivian fu photographs

into the secretly-pinkhassov-IH, 龜

uhm vivian fu

http://87-mm.tumblr.com/post/76837448959/merging-boundaries-by-ian-teh

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/photobooth/2014/04/saul-leiter-in-black-and-white.html

http://shihlun.tumblr.com/post/82983643523/wong-ting-hua-jiufen-1960s

http://lightbox.time.com/2014/03/11/beyond-cartier-bresson-a-history-of-a-masters-early-work/

Startling how much the 1st paragraph seems to echo the photograph that turned HCB from painting to photography in the first place, Three Boys at Lake Tanganyika

Second one could be an Atget

I guess there's a reason we never see these early photographs tho

http://lightbox.time.com/2014/03/12/photos-of-the-real-world-amy-powells-family-album/

龜 toiling alone itt

i am gonna catch up on this slick of links ^^^

just beautiful new hirano takaci photographs,

http://37.media.tumblr.com/c777cc1d007e469b04563299524fd2e5/tumblr_n4g7fwZj8f1qe50hoo1_1280.jpg

http://hiranotakaci.tumblr.com

Saw this via Self Publish Be Happy: http://www.robertherman.com/index.php#p=-1&a=0&at=0 ('The New Yorkers')

http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/04/03/through-her-minds-eye-a-world-apart/

http://24.media.tumblr.com/96c6029172a92429ded5e187684ac74b/tumblr_myjcg82cSi1qzy1h1o1_1280.jpg

http://37.media.tumblr.com/10c822a5f268aa20c1382c04d00d655c/tumblr_myjnecQAwc1qzy1h1o1_1280.jpg

really feeling this steph davidson blog

hard not to love these ian teh photographs

http://www.berettaconsulting.com/barbarossa/WTbigshow.html

http://www.anothermag.com/current/view/3563/Dolce_Via_Rome_in_the_80s

http://i.imgur.com/myP7ni7.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/eZY7kxk.jpg

http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/04/15/chang-chao-tang-in-taiwan/

http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/shigeichi-nagano

http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-andree-balloon-crash-a-photographic-journey-through-to-most-surreal-of-arctic-disasters

those are wild

http://i.imgur.com/OTIN14S.jpg

What seasoned photographer would ever frame the shot like this unless by accident

Would that I could unlearn everything I know and go back to being a naïf

so otm

guys i miss taking pictures

do you have cellphone snaps you like?

ps hi

http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/05/08/pictures-on-the-street-its-complicated/

http://www.oitzarisme.ro/2014/04/06/knut-inge-johnsen-snapshots-from-my-window/

Love the repetition here

http://www.lightleaked.com/2014/05/whats-going-on-with-photography-by-carl.html

^ Not pictures, an essay

http://hamburgereyes.tumblr.com/post/85367928414

love michael jang

^ My first draft of the post included 'attn: gr808"

i accidentally shipped his book w/ those photos to my old hawaii address and it never got forwarded to me :-(