Where do you go from there?

<p><a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2304449/Colour-Photography-pioneer-William-Eggleston-honored-showing-America-new-light.html">http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2304449/Colour-Photography-pioneer-William-Eggleston-honored-showing-America-new-light.html</a></p>

<p>So Tim look at that one. It's from the '60's. I remember being in places like that and wondering what was the deal with the hair. And the smoking? Thinking 'what's the deal with the hair': weren't we all there at some point? Seeing a woman, a stranger with the beehive long after that style had passed, she never having changed her style? But it was impolite to notice, impolite to take out a camera and record it because that would call attention to the fact that you noticed something about another person that was private about them and not quite right or comfortable in themselves, something rigid in them. You smile maybe, but you don't say. But there it is in a photo. I smile. And that's my reaction to the photo. It's a surreptitious photo of someone's blind spot. It's banal and it is sensitively done. Is it dated? Probably. You would have to know the era, the timing of hair styles, and the charge that was in the air at that time. So it would take some study for a young person to 'get' it.</p>

<blockquote>

<p>I was under the assumption educated people already get his work and don't have to have it explained to them.</p>

</blockquote>

<p>That would be an assumption well worth re-examining. Without Szarkowski, educated or not, we wouldn't have had both physical and intellectual access to Eggleston at the time. <br>

<br>

I think we sometimes lose sight of the fact that art is not simply about artist and viewer. The curator and critic are often a go-between that help create the environment (the world) and dialogue/conversation of art. One of the myths of art is that all it is is a personal dialogue between artist and me-me-me. There's an entire community determining what we even see (a filtration system of sorts) and a bigger community sharing it and struggling to understand it, especially when it's something new, something for which we may not yet have a vocabulary, which is often what we want from our artists. Art doesn't take place in a subjective vacuum. <br>

<br>

A lot of art is hard or at least challenging. It can take a whole lot of explaining. Art can be confusing as can initial exposure to writing about it. I am becoming more literate about art all the time, both because I view more of it and because I read more about it.</p>

<blockquote>

<p>a subject that is so abstract and subjective</p>

</blockquote>

<p> . . . really leaves out a large part of the story. Art can also be quite concrete, historically and culturally placed, and shared as much as subjective.</p>

<blockquote>

<p>Why would he have to convince highly educated people of Eggleston's work by employing an academic writing style the common man can't even decipher? I was under the assumption educated people already get his work and don't have to have it explained to them.<br>

Or maybe they're all just a gang of like minded people who like talking this way to give credence and respect to their own endeavors much like street gangs employ their own language system that create the ties that bind.</p>

</blockquote>

<p>+1 Tim. They deliberately complicate a simple thing just to impress others and fill the page with confusing words to justify themselves. There's really not that much there. Heck, it's only a picture.</p>

<p>Alan, does this have to devolve into ad hominem attacks on the writer? If you disagree with the substance of what he's saying, then bring that to light. But attributing to Szarkowski motives that you've completely fabricated is unfair not only to him but to those of us who take him more seriously. Earlier you said that you take the same amount of time with a photo as you do with a potato chip. That's you. Can you possibly try to understand that others might take more time and want a deeper experience even if you don't? If you want to view photos a certain way, more power to you. But why throw stones at those who do it differently?</p>

<p>How is it you and Tim know what Szarkowski deliberately does and that he's out to impress people and to justify himself? Wouldn't you be better off either addressing his ideas or simply ignoring him rather than project motives onto him you don't have any clue about? You lose all credibility in this discussion by employing these kinds of indefensible tactics.</p>

<p>If I ignore the critic's view as you suggest, then I give credence to their importance by remaining silent. My opinion is that much of what they write is just plain fluff to fill the page or article they have to write. Their words are a lot of nonsense. That is addressing their ideas.</p>

<p>By telling me to be silent, then you're telling others their voice and opinion aren't allowed here if they disagree with your viewpoints. Don't you agree that my opinion is as valid and important as yours?</p>

<p>Alan, yes, I think you're as entitled to your opinion as anyone else. I don't think your opinion is as valid as everyone else's. Just as I don't think the opinion that evolution is a hoax is as valid as other opinions, though I think those who think evolution is a hoax are entitled to that opinion.</p>

<p>But none of that has anything to do with my gripe here. What I said is that your ad hominem attacks are unnecessary, especially when they go beyond the writer we're discussing and include the "gang" of those who are like-minded, like a bunch of us participating in this thread. If you disagree with my ideas, I'm totally OK with hearing that. What I'm not OK with is being told by you and Tim why I express the ideas I express, what my self-serving motivations are, etc.</p>

<p>Do you get the difference?</p>

<p>Fred G. <br>

I can personally verify that Eggleston comment (as quoted by you) express his truly held feelings. I was at an Eggleston opening in Memphis sometime in the ‘80’s. I had never seen his work. I think. he was just touted as important“Southern” regional then. <br>

The exhibit was of Pharaonic stuff in Egypt commissioned by someone. In the Q&A, in my view and others, he was very reticent. Annoyingly so. He mumbled vague answers and even got heckled. The work was, as I recall, high key color. I knew what hi-key color is <em>supposed</em> to look like, done well, so for me, he was OK in that respect. I just wasn’t impressed with what <em>he </em>found interesting. To me it looked like <em>records</em>, or something forensic. I viewed “color” as mostly <em>about </em>color at the time.<br>

WOW this topic has turned into an Egg-athon! <br>

Alan Z.<br>

<br>

</p>

<p>Anyone else, as I have, as Szarkowski had, visually scan one of the two Eggleston photos and describe in writing for the thread's benefit their feelings and imaginings of either photo?</p>

<p><a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2304449/Colour-Photography-pioneer-William-Eggleston-honored-showing-America-new-light.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2304449/Colour-Photography-pioneer-William-Eggleston-honored-showing-America-new-light.html</a></p>

<p><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_qsSkaXuuUE8/TTUbueanS-I/AAAAAAAAADc/ZbzqWi6O_qE/s1600/050820101166_resize.jpg" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_qsSkaXuuUE8/TTUbueanS-I/AAAAAAAAADc/ZbzqWi6O_qE/s1600/050820101166_resize.jpg</a></p>

<p> </p>

<p>Alan Z., I had no doubt that Eggleston expressed his true feelings. What I don't know is whether he would have put down Szarkowski for his writings. I took Eggleston to be talking about HIS OWN not wanting to discuss his photos, though maybe he didn't think much of critics talking about his photos either.</p>

<p>____________________________________________</p>

<p>Regardless, I think photographers are best suited to photography and critics are best suited to criticism. To at least that extent, I agree with Szarkovski when he says "<em>Artists themselves tend to take absolutist and unhelpful positions when addressing themselves to questions of content, . . . [this] allow the artist to answer unanswerable questions briefly and then get back to work." </em>This, IMO, is as it should be and I have often said myself that artists are not always the best ones to talk about art and photographers not always the best ones to talk about their own photography. They are authorities on producing the work, not on discussing it or putting it into context or perspective or thinking about what it "means." Both photographers and critics have some very different things at stake. Conflating the role of artist and critic and insisting that the critic stick to the tools or means of expression of the artist would be, IMO, a mistake.</p>

<p>Dr. Seuss said things much more simply than James Joyce which didn't make him a better writer. Just a different kind of writer. Bach's fugues are generally easier to listen to and access than Mahler's symphonies, which doesn't make Bach's fugues more worthwhile. Monet's landscapes are less psychologically challenging and dense than Munch's paintings. . . .</p>

<p>Alan Klein "There's really not that much there. Heck, it's only a picture."</p>

<p><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_qsSkaXuuUE8/TTUbueanS-I/AAAAAAAAADc/ZbzqWi6O_qE/s1600/050820101166_resize.jpg" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_qsSkaXuuUE8/TTUbueanS-I/AAAAAAAAADc/ZbzqWi6O_qE/s1600/050820101166_resize.jpg</a></p>

<p>It's only a picture. You say there isn't really much there. So your opinion is that there is something there? You didn't write "There isn't anything there." You wrote there isn't much there. What is the 'much' that <em>is</em> there for you? </p>

<p> </p>

<p>Charles, the Beehive photo . . . the green is as strong as the daring-ness of taking a picture where the back of the woman's head is completely blocking her partner's face. Centered and in your face. I feel dared to both see this and not see this as a bad snapshot or as a mistake. He's toying with me. The photo, in this respect, in the way the composition and content relate and struggle, is mindfully mindless, conscientiously cavalier. It's a considered kind of offhandedness.</p>

Charles. Actually I didn't see anything there. But I

didn't want to be insulting so I said I didn't see much

there.

<p>Thanks Alan. And I read Szarkowski as saying that you are right, that Eggleston takes a picture of an apple and it is just an apple. Szarkowski heard exactly your opinion from many critics. Yet Szarkowski persisted in his support of Eggleston. The car in the neighborhood isn't as 'fascinating' to me as the photo of the woman with the hair. From one picture, I would think of Eggleston as a kind of joke. But in the hair picture, I felt a lot of things. If the woman doesn't know her hair is hopelessly out of style, if that is her blind spot, not knowing she looks like time has stopped for her, then the picture is taken of the back of her head. We can't see the backs of our own heads. We're blind to what we can't see about ourselves that everyone else can see. But that's how I see that photo. Did Eggleston intend for that photo be interpreted the way I see it? Or for Eggleston was it just a lady smoking in a café? There aren't answers and I find that a bit irksome.</p>

<p>Phil S "Who is this "common man"? The irony of the anti-intellectualists is that they so often see and express themselves as being smarter and standing above those who are in the pursuit of ideas ( which comes from a willingness to doubt rather than stating or thinking one knows it all and has nothing new to learn ) while at the same time thinking to speak for the "common man".</p>

<p>Consider this quote from Szarkowski:</p>

 

<blockquote>

<p>These pictures are fascinating partly because they contradict our expectations. We have been told so often of the bland, synthetic smoothness of exemplary American life, of its comfortable, vacant insentience, its extruded, stamped, and molded sameness, in a word its irredeemable dullness, that we have come half to believe it, and thus are startled and perhaps exhilarated to see these pictures of prototypically normal types on their familiar ground, grandchildren of Penrod, who seem to live surrounded by spirits, not all of them benign.</p>

</blockquote>

<p>"These pictures are fascinating partly because they contradict our expectations."</p>

 

<blockquote>

<p>Whose expectations are contradicted by these fascinating pictures? What specifically are those expectations being contradicted?</p>

</blockquote>

<p>"We have been told so often of the bland, synthetic smoothness of exemplary American life...."</p>

 

<blockquote>

<p>Who is 'we'? We refers to Szarkowski's presumed readers, his audience. Szarkowski and his audience have been told so often that words like bland describe American life. Is he saying that his audience has been told so often that they themselves are bland and synthetically smooth? Does his audience agree that as Americans they are bland, synthetically smooth, possessed of a comfortable, vacant insentience. Does his audience, do his readers consider their own lived lives as an extruded, stamped and molded sameness? Do his readers believe themselves <em>in situ</em> to be irredeemably dull, do they only half believe that they themselves are bland, synthetically smooth examples of vacant insentience, wearing a patina of extruded, stamped and molded sameness?</p>

<p>Does his audience look around at other audience members and gasp at how irredeemably dull everyone is, gasp at themselvesf? Is that how Szarkowski describes his own audience, as vacantly insentient? If he were describing his reader, wouldn't the reader put the book down for being insulted by being described as synthetic, vacant and insentient? Does a writer normally insult his reader? Or, as I suspect as more likely, is Szarkowski describing the common man, the uncultured, those without a fine patina, distinguishing the common man from his cultured audience, his cultured audience of course not being synthetic, vacant, insentient, stamped, molded all the same, his audience is not irredeemably dull like the common man? </p>

</blockquote>

<p> "....thus are startled and perhaps exhilarated to see these pictures of prototypically normal types on their familiar ground, grandchildren of Penrod, who seem to live surrounded by spirits, not all of them benign.....Such speculations, however, even if not simple nonsense..."</p>

<blockquote>

<p> <br>

Startled? By what? That the pictures defy the preconception of a neighbor as being just an uncultured blob of sameness? Phil can you see how Szarkowski can sound like he is speaking from a seat on a high horse? Would he go into a pool hall or tavern and say "Hey folks, you vacantly insentient dullards, check out my threads?" I suspect he wouldn't. Because for his audience he is play acting above all.</p>

<p>But his speculations are simply nonsense and he acknowledges that. Nonsense might also be my interpretation of the 'hair' photo.</p>

</blockquote>

 

<p>And Fred gets another sense of things, and I agree that the photo comes off as conscientiously cavalier. Is there a correct interpretation? No.</p>

<p>Charles, something to consider which I mentioned recently in another thread. There's a difference between an interpretation and an analysis. An interpretation will often attempt to give literal meanings to the elements of a photo: this represents that.</p>

<p>I was thinking for instance that, for me, the strong green and the color in general in the Beehive photo acts as a punctuation mark to the relationship between composition and content. That's different from saying, for example and which I wouldn't, that the green suggests to me that the woman is envious, which would be to interpret the green as representing envy.</p>

<p>I think the quotes offered here by Szarkowski are more in the realm of criticism or analysis than they are in the realm of interpretation.</p>

<p>Interpretations, criticisms, and analyses are probably better seen in terms of how well supported they are and how coherent they seem (not how simplistic but how coherent) as opposed to how right they are. They will either deepen or make richer my experience of the photo or they won't. Those that don't aren't necessarily wrong and those that do aren't necessarily right.</p>

<p>Fred for me interpretation, analysis, I don't know. So the word interpretation. Let me think. An interpretation begins with identifying literals and proceeds to associate meanings to the literals. Identify the literals, then sequentially tag the literals with possible meanings. Interpretation: two steps and you're done. Szarkowski seems to call that two step process a reading. (See below) On the other hand an analysis can begin once all significant literals are interpreted, are identified and tagged with meanings. An analysis would then take all those identified elements and compare each to the other and each to the whole thing. An analysis can also bring in other contexts, etc. Interpret elements, analyze or critique the whole collection of elements that have been interpreted.</p>

<blockquote>

<p>Think of it as a picture that describes boundaries: the boundary between the city and the country, civilization and wilderness, the fail-safe point between community and freedom, the frontier of restrained protest or cautious adventure. And the boundary between the new and the old, the new neighborhood advancing into the old land, but the neighborhood itself not so new as last year, the house in the foreground no longer the last in the line, and the '56 Buick that stands by its doors already poised on the fulcrum of middle age, still well-shined and well-serviced, competent and presentable, but nevertheless no longer young. And the boundary that separates day from evening, the time of hard shadows and yellow heat from the cool blue opalescent dusk, the time of demarcation between the separate and public lives of the day and the private communal lives of evening, the point at which families begin to gather again beneath their atavistic roofs and the neighborhood sounds with women's voices crying the names of children.</p>

</blockquote>

<p><br /> <em><br /></em>He walks through the picture elements, associates meanings with them (tags them). He calls that a reading:</p>

<blockquote>

<p>Such a reading might damage the picture only for the very impressionable, and might prompt some others to look at the picture longer than they would have without the encouragement of words. But the meaning of words and those of pictures are at best parallel, describing two lines of thought that do not meet; and if our concern is for the meaning of pictures, verbal descriptions are finally gratuitous.</p>

</blockquote>

<p><br /> Here is part of his analysis or critique:</p>

<blockquote>

<p>One can say, to repeat, that in Eggleston's pictures form and content are indistinguishable, which seems to me true but also unsatisfactory because too permissive. The same thing can be said of any picture. The ambitious photographer, not satisfied by so tautological a success, seeks those pictures that have a visceral relation to his own self and his own privileged knowledge, those that belong to him by genetic right, in which form matches not only content but intent.</p>

</blockquote>

<p><br /> Fred are you then saying that his methodology is to interpret then to critique? Is he being that formal in his writing? If so he is in both realms, in both interpretation and analysis.<br>

<br /> How good is it? How helpful? Probably not an example of his best writing, as Phil has suggested in offering a bit of a better piece by Szarkowski. But clearly, Szarkowski abandoned the notion that he would write in Eggleston's forward something that was 'right'. That's clear and I've more than well supported that conclusion of mine.</p>

<p>But I should add, if I've ruffled any feathers, that I think I could have done a better job than did Szarkowski at interpretation and analysis of an Eggleston had I the background and training. What I couldn't have done is to find an Eggleston and had I found him I would have felt so much uncertainty in my own assessment of Eggleston that I couldn't have stood before a critical audience and promoted him as tirelessly as Szarkowski seemed to. With an Eggleston I wouldn't have had the courage of my convictions. I've had the courage of my convictions about other things, but not that. It's all so ambiguous and I tend to just want to crush things that wiggle around that much.</p>

<p>Charles, I think I'll just leave it at what I said. I don't know that more litigation of Szarkowski will be that helpful.</p>

<p>OK. Let me just say this. I found your blind spot reading a bit of a stretch and a bit too literal, for me. But I can appreciate your seeing that in it and certainly think it's supportable. It just doesn't ring for me. I find Szarkowski in these quotes less literal in his reading of Eggleston's photos and a lot of his thoughts struck a chord with me. He gives me more a <em>way of looking</em> than a <em>meaning to get</em>. The notion of boundaries seems to be like a framework within which to see Eggleston's work. The back of the head as blind spot is more specific and tied down. </p>

<p>This short passage on Pollack in the movie "Ex Machina" linked below pretty much explains for me how Eggleston was communicating with his seemingly nothing moments captured with each shutter release. In a previous discussion on Eggleston a while back I saw a video of him just walking around pointing and shooting without forethought treating reality as a free form finger painting routine with each trip of the shutter.</p>

<p>There is one F-bomb in the dialog...<br>

<p>This is similar to what I used to do as kid making my head the camera panning slowly across my environment blinking intermittently like a shutter release and relying on my memory as the film or sensor medium in reconstructing each still in my conscious wake state. The results always looked like a dream. There's no expectations and no intent but just a snippet of what we all see in our environment taken out of context within the flow of day to day consciousness. <br>

<br />Eggleston makes us look at something we're all familiar with but usually pass by in our conscious awake state cluttered with expectations, purpose, motivation, desire, basically the things that make us think we need to move forward in life or we'll not survive the future while the now passes us by. He's somewhat reminding us to all just live in the moment.</p>

<p>Szarkowski's reaction resembles the behavior of the apes dealing with the obelisk in "A 2001 Space Odyssey". A shape whose straight lines are foreign but whose purpose and intent are in doubt but at the same time calming due to its stillness. He's left with talking like a blithering idiot using an "intellectual" language style to express what he's feeling like some rap artist. I can only imagine his editor must've went ape as well.</p>

<p>Charles, a lot of the scenes in your link showing Eggleston's POV I've actually seen growing up in south Texas back in that time. He's looking at this world as I did through a child's eyes as normal and familiar but at certain angles and lighting can look quite disturbing and interesting. That hairstyle was common back then in my neck of the woods but I do remember at my local chow house looking at the back of people's heads straight on appeared just as disturbing to me. So I share Eggleston's view of that world.</p>

<p> </p>

<p>Szarkowski quote from Phil S's previous post:<em><br /></em></p>

<blockquote>

<p><em>I once heard William Eggleston say that the nominal subjects of his pictures were no more than a pretext for the making of color photographs - the Degas position. I did not believe him, although I can believe that it might be an advantage to him to think so, or to pretend to think so.</em></p>

</blockquote>

<p>So he didn't even believe the artist? So it is all about how Szarkowski interpreted Eggleston's work. Well I believe Eggleston.<br /> <br /> Looking around for scenes that will look good in color is a similar motivation Pollack employed. Don't think, react to make it look accidental even if you use a different purpose or motivation whether technical or just happenstanc<em>e. </em>Expectation is the killer of spontaneity. <em><br /></em></p>

<p>I then read it thusly.</p>

<p>We have an expectation to find in Eggleston's pictorial survey of America a molded sameness in the characters. Instead we are fascinated because Eggleston presents us with Penrodesque characters, not with characters that are extruded and stamped. We're fascinated because they aren't vacant and insentient at all. We're startled, perhaps even exhilarated to see pictures of prototypically normal types, types capable of self-loathing [why self-loathing mentioned first, <em>should</em> they be self-loathing], adaptability [is adaptability a modern vice, an ancient one, or not a vice at all? It's a vice if instead he used adaptability as a euphemism for sneaky], dissembling, sanctimony, and licentiousness. Interesting in their lack of progress. Lack of progress? Compared to whose progress? <em>Their</em> progress? What about progress in the North because Szarkowski sure seems to be singling out Eggleston's South as a repository for vices. An enumeration of vices as belonging to a non progressing sub-culture is archetypally termed a shadow projection. I don't know which is worse: to be regarded in someone's ill informed imagination as a bland, vacant, insentient dullard or to be displayed in a picture book as self-loathing, dissembling, sanctimonious, adaptable [crafty, sneaky], licentious, prideful, parochially stubborn, irrational, selfish and lustful.</p>

<p>Szarkowski's text asks us to be fascinated by the exotic and bizarre characters 'exhibited' in Eggleston's book. The subject IS exotic and bizarre to Szarkowski's presumed readers. Szarkowski's self-assessment is that what he says might be nonsense. It isn't nonsense when seen as Szarkowsk's confession of a deeply held prejudice of a Yankee toward the South, albeit unconscious and full of projection, Cameraonesque.</p>

<p>Fred, Tim:</p>

<p>I can put myself in Eggleston's place in the beehive photo, I've sat there just like Tim has in that Southern type of place in that era. Both Tim and I could have attempted to take that picture, so it is literal and real to me, to Tim. It is Tim, my and Eggleston's lived experience, it's documentary. There's nothing to interpret. For others, they can view it differently. </p>

<p>I think viewers and critics have all the time in the world to make much more of a photo than it is or that the photographer considered when he shot it.</p>

<p>This photo was shot at a moments notice. This toothless woman comes into a diner I was eating in on the boardwalk in Coney Island. She's carrying Mickey under her arm. What a strange sight. The rides and amusement park at Coney was closed. It wasn't the season. So why did she have Mickey? Did she keep him at home taking him for walks? Was he her friend, her child, her companion? Did my shot explain the story about this woman or was it just an excuse to compile about six items with different shades of red in it? Did the reds add to the questions or explain the photo? Was I seeking out strange New Yorker's to capture their idiosyncrasies? This could go on and on.</p>

<p>The point is I wasn't even looking for any picture. The camera I had was a P&S I wore on my belt for work purposes. I was just sitting there eating my pancakes and crispy bacon with coffee during a work day. Yes, I saw an unusual scene. But a critic could read in so much that just wasn't there; at least that I thought about in my mind before I shot it. I just hurried with my surreptitious shot before the action was over. </p>

<p> </p>

<p>I think viewers and critics have all the time in the world to make much more of a photo than it is or that the photographer considered when he shot it.</p>

<p>This photo was shot at a moments notice. This toothless woman comes into a diner I was eating in on the boardwalk in Coney Island. She's carrying Mickey under her arm. What a strange sight. The rides and amusement park at Coney was closed. It wasn't the season. So why did she have Mickey? Did she keep him at home taking him for walks? Was he her friend, her child, her companion? Did my shot explain the story about this woman or was it just an excuse to compile about six items with different shades of red in it? Did the reds add to the questions or explain the photo? Was I seeking out strange New Yorker's to capture their idiosyncrasies? This could go on and on.</p>

<p>The point is I wasn't even looking for any picture. The camera I had was a P&S I wore on my belt for work purposes. I was just sitting there eating my pancakes and crispy bacon with coffee during a work day. Yes, I saw an unusual scene. But a critic could read in so much that just wasn't there; at least that I thought about in my mind before I shot it. I just hurried with my surreptitious shot before the action was over. </p>

<p> </p><div></div>