Posting today an image not out of my camera but out of that belonging to William Eggleston. I have just finished reading Geoff Dyer's The Ongoing Moment. Already missing it and considering re-reading for the third time another of his books 'Yoga for People Who Can't Be Bothered To Do It'....and then there's his book on Jazz, 'But Beautiful'. I digress, but then again, I don't. His thoughts on photography run like a thread through the latter two and spread out into a beautiful interlacing delta of fact and deep delight and existential contemplation in the third.
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:
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:
William Eggleston's photograph: Peaches
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