Ever looked at William Eggleston’s photos and scratched your head? Wondering what the point of them is? However, when you scratch a little deeper into his photography there is a set of lessons to discover which will change the way you think about taking photographs.
Footage from
Imagine | The Colourful Mr Eggleston –
All images Copyright Eggleston Artistic Trust/William Eggleston
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00:00 – William Eggleston
00:09 – What is the point?
00:57 – What is William Eggleston’s photography about?
02:18 – Meaning in photography
03:12 – Photograph ‘The Ugly’
05:07 – Influence of Henri Cartier-Bresson on William Eggleston
07:12 – William Eggleston and color photography
09:19 – Opening of Museum of Modern Art Show
10:56 – Understanding William Eggleston
12:36 – Photograph once and move on
14:16 – Democratic Photography
Comments
40 responses to “Unraveling the Mystery of 'Boring' Photography”
I often take pictures of just the things I see! The thought I often have is “who else is capturing it?” and will there be a record of it in 20 years if I don’t!
If you think the work of William Egglestone is boring then you probably have a over dimensional tattoo on your thigh of some long dead family member and an instagram account full of pictures of yourself trying to convince yourself and others you are leading a fulfilling life.
Making icons from the mundane.👍
I loved the use of color while capturing every day life in a way that you could actually see yourself being there.
My photography has forever been influenced by a friend from university who said that you're a good photographer when you can make something boring look interesting. And since there wasn't much interesting to photograph where we lived and I had an urge to go out and photograph I just tried to find ways that photography can transform mundane reality. And that's what I've been doing forever since and I love it.
I love the “style” of his color photography. The way the camera would translate the colors is something I’d like to have a filter or preset of.
This is what you see when a photographer with a certain spectrum of autism takes photos. It's a reflection. The work is always a part of the artist.
Your child could never take photos like Eggleston. Love his boring photos. Only he could take pictures like that.
Nothing more special about these images than snapshots on my iPhone. Some tasteless dude in a beret at an art college probably tried to make these “cool” but there is nothing special or glorifying about the images or the photographer IMO
Interesting story, and a great advise.
However the majority of the pictures shown here are still boring imho.
Very interesting video! Thanks so much for sharing. I have to say I've been one of those guys who largely didn't understand Eggleston's work. This really helped me appreciate it.
I just don't want my photos to look like his. Please God, not like his. My images are not that great. But if someone compared my work to his, I would give my thousands of dollars of gear to some starving photographer that took good pictures, then commit suicide. Joking. I seen someone on flickr who called himself a street photographer. He took snapshots at best at worst it was bad. Same as this guys.. I get where you are coming from, but I am very nostalgic and these don't float my boat at all. I would even say he did a bad job of shooting ugly things. I found few of the things truly ugly. They were just snapshots with no thought behind them. I think I could fly a drone around and someone blind folded pressing the shutter button and create more interesting images. Sorry, can't by into this photographer. Even the guy on flickr was slightly better, he showed more snapshots of people.
Legend
Living in Memphis.. he’s right .. everything here is ugly, flat and hot. There is no landscape to photograph.. flat as a pancake
Just love the variety of perspectives you get on this channel. I have to admit that this approach to photography isn’t an easy sell with me either — but you’ve convinced me that it’s always well worth making the effort to take a second look.
He is now inspired me to go take a photo of my trashcan in the kitchen. Hopefully someone will think it’s a great photograph.😊
Eggleston came up during the abstract expressionism era. That movement is all about color, patterns, geometry, etc. for their own sake. Such works don't have to be "of" or "about" anything, which is the antithesis of what photography is traditionally "supposed" to be about. Then you have the Pop Art moveement of the Sixties where artists like Ed Ruscha and Claus Oldenburg made the banal into the epic. Eggleston sees something that looks cool, the colors and patterns and light and shadow look interesting, he shoots them. I live in Queens, New York City. Of the five boroughs, Queens is probably the second-most-boring after Staten Island. I should really shoot around Queens more often, just because.
I guess I need to take an Eggleston walk around the block and see what pops up.
Must be nice to become a professional known photographer for taking a load of snap shots. There are photographs I've seen of boring subjects, but they make that subject mesmerising. Sometimes I'm impressed with how sharp the picture is, or the composition of the shot or the close up of an ordinary object so it looks like something different. How an ugly building or incredibly old person, or vagrant can look mysterious, beautiful or profound. I stopped watching, because the shots were just awful, in every way, but perhaps he accidentally took a few good shots and sure they are capturing history as it's happening. I'm certainly grateful for the early photographs, because they are just normal life, but now they are historical artifacts.
Perhaps it's the photographic equivalent of white paint on white canvas BS that painters started to do.
Is it important to "have your work shown" in a gallery?
"It's their job to understand my art" just struck me kind of funny.
(The passive voice strikes me as odd too because it seems like there is some effort involved in getting people to want to show one's work in a gallery. It isn't as though people just call you up, out of the blue and say, "I want you to send me 10 16×20's of your favorite images with the color rose in them" is it? Or maybe they do. I don't know.)
I don't think I'm expressing this well. I did put one photo in my local art gallery's member's show once, but it seemed kind of pointless and … it made me tired and slightly depressed in a "seeing how the sausage is made" kind of way.
Photographing the ordinary, often in an extraordinary way.
Mid way through the video … still provoked by your lack of understanding in the art making process …. there's a difference between popular photography with an actual "document " of life … I always used to tell the younger students to first understand the role of the artist then set out to define art … in this case the role of Eggelston was to respond to the world around him in meaningful ways … and he did…
As for the video , I hope I can make it to the end .. please don't do a video about Robert Frank being boring … or HCB, or Stephen shore , or Eugene Atget …. ect / I may have to look into your channel further before I judge, like or subscribe…
Cheers v2
To be honest, if Eggleston could put into words what his images are about, why take the picture? The image speaks for itself. If an image doesn't have an apparent narrative element or isn't depicting a well known scene in nature, then, ostensibly, that wasn't the intent of the photographer. Any description or prescribed way of seeing something is limiting.
Without seeing the video but knowing photo history well enough to have taught it to future generations …. are you sure "boring" is the right word to be alongside Eggeelston …. to even consider a discussion of his work one would need to know their colour theory as well as 20th. Century painting … a bit of post war capitalism critique and on and on …
Let's see what your video is about either way as I can't judge a YouTube video by its click bait title …
Cheers
I don't think all of Eggleston's work is great, but the effective images are really great. For me, color is the subject of all of his work. Looking at his work is very instructive if one wants to learn how to see color (shades of the same color, contrasting colors, color harmonies, etc.). That profile photo at around 3:30 of the young red-headed woman in the pink dress against the background of the green foliage is really lovely.
Thank you Alex. This lovely vignette of one of my favorites got me to blow the dust off my dslr, slap my 50 on it and snap some pics of the mess of my life lying about my house. This is always the first step: picking up the damned camera and just for eff's sake taking some pictures–critics (external and internal) be damned! And now I am in all likelihood going to go pick up some Thai food for the family and hopefully snap a few more garbage picks of my 'adventure'……
Thank you!
I got a good chuckle at "ashtrays and clouds." I get a sense of solitude with his photography.
I recently regained interest in photography. It’s been lying dormant in the back of my soul for quite some years now. I like a lot of genre and I’m still wondering which one suits me best. I discovered Eggleston on this channel and have been fascinated from the get go. How this man turn the ordinary into absolute beauty. I’m constantly looking for a way to emulate his work and somehow make it my own. This second piece on his work has a lot of things for me to reflect on. Thank you Alex!
He used the dye transfer method for his prints. Very high quality and vivid colour rendition.
Anyone could have taken those pictures, but they didn't. He did.
Gestalt
Something I've been thinking about a lot lately is that it really isn't very important what I photograph. What is important is that I have an opinion, an attitude, a reaction to what I am seeing around me. I don't know if this solves any mysteries as to how to make a good image, but it does help me be more mindful of what I am seeing and how I am reacting to it.
I found this video very liberating (for me). After watching this video, I'm no longer scared to be and to do what "I" LOVE to do. Just photograph what makes me tick. I love this. Thank you so much again for this video.
Like ICM, there is a subtle, but major, difference between pure accident and great composition – however casually the photographer speaks about it.
I found this study of William Eggleston very liberating – thank you! It's easy to get stuck in an RPS/PAGB rut, when we are actually free to capture life in all its 'normalness'. Excellent stuff!
Serendipitous timing. I just started an attempt to shoot like Eggleston or Shore. It's a lot harder than you think!
I just call my silly photos selfies of my mind …
Eggleston/ Martin Parr both Emperors new clothes pure snake oil
I'm guessing that it's at least a bit about a shared personal perspective, and some of us just resonate with some artists way of seeing the world more than others. I get Eggleston's stuff right away, but there are plenty of other respected artists that I'm just like "why?" lol. Also when an artist does something that hasn't really been done before, it can be confusing without a frame of reference, explaining posthumous recognition in some cases, the world just wasn't ready. I think when something "good" is created, it's because it's fundamentally following or at least referencing some sort of natural law, something innately human about the way we experience the world, whether we recognize it consciously or not, including perspectives that to some degree hadn't even existed in history before. Whether or not we're in touch with those -senses? – I really don't have the right words, or what parts of them we do align with affect how we react to art. This is my vague and poorly expressed theory and I'm sticking with it ha!
I think your interpretation is missing the fact that there is clearly an order to his photographs. Looking at it, it's clear that he paid attention to color, figure, and line and wasn't just shooting mindlessly (or maybe his curators chose the interesting ones) There's also clearly a social thematic in terms of choosing to shoot sex clubs and old upper class women. Don't forget that Eggleston was an upper class White Male and that meant ge could act aloof and indifferent to serious art and "get away with it" through claiming a certain aura of the artist that other people couldn't.