Prior to page 192 (The Ongoing Moment), Dyer has been pursuing a conversation about the advent of colour photography and the attitudes and reactions of a number of photographers faced with that choice for the first time. Dyer then gets to Eggleston and quotes John Szarkowski (not solely referring to Eggleston here): '...these pictures are not photographs of colour, any more than they are photographs of shapes, textures, objects, symbols, or events, but rather photographs of experience, as it has been ordered and clarified within the structures imposed by the camera.'
I'm taking Szarkowski's words out of context - I quote them here just because I love the sentence. 'Photographs of experience' speaks to me. Mysteriously. And so does 'ordered and clarified within the structures imposed by the camera.'
A few years back I began to collect images, possibly to be projected in a theatre show I was in the process of creating. I took many images of hydrangeas - their big cauliflower heads, their clumsy beauty. Someone I met had shown me an app called 'Hipstamatic' (perhaps a bit like Instagram which I have never tried). When I shot with Hipstamatic, the lens worked differently - the resultant shot was different to my aim. I found these oblique views compelling. The camera (or in this case the app) was teaching me something. It had it's own aesthetic to 'impose', and allowed me to share in it.
I had not heard of Eggleston until a few days ago. Great joy to meet him. I hope I infringe no copyright by posting here what you can easily view on the web: