Tag: William Eggleston

Readings for February 20 class

Thursday, February 12th, 2009

I’m teaching a history of contemporary photography course this semester at the College of Santa Fe. Thus far we have read, in its entirety and out loud in class, The Nature of Photographs by Stephen Shore. It’s one of those books that lays a foundation for a semester (if not a lifetime) of discussion about photographs and how they operate on and within usâ€”and likewise, how we, mentally, operate on them.

This post is primarily for my students (but anyone can follow along).

Readings for our Friday, February 20th class include the following (to be found on the web):

* Two reviews of the Lee Friedlander retrospective held at the Museum of Modern Art in 2005. Review 1 is here and review 2 is here.

* The text of the essay to William Eggleston’s Guide, by John Szarkowski. A selection of Eggleston’s images from that body of work can be found here.

* The text of the interview I conducted with Stephen Shore last Spring, which can be found here (on this blog).

Some photographs by Lee Friedlander from that exhibition:

Some photographs by William Eggleston from his MoMA show:

Tags: Lee Friedlander, Stephen Shore, William Eggleston
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Thinking about Eggleston

Friday, November 21st, 2008

In an earlier post this week, I listed Friedlander, Eggleston, Stephen Shore, Diane Arbus and the Bechers as a group of progenitors of nearly everything that is happening in contemporary photography. Of course, this is not true. Or at least, it requires some clarification. There are far too many forces in the world pushing and pulling and shaping events, thoughts, attitudes and actions to distill the use of photography over a 30 year period down to just 6 people.

But the influence of these photographers is rather monumental (and that’s a statement I’ll stand behind). Many other critics have said as much, so I’m not really out on a limb here.

Lee Friedlander enjoyed a massive one-man retrospective in 2004 at the Museum of Modern Art, curated by Peter Galassi (but thoroughly endorsed and set into motion decades earlier by John Szarkowski).

William Eggleston had enjoyed his one-man show at MoMA back in 1976. It was also endorsedâ€”hand-picked and curatedâ€”by Szarkowski, and by doing so, the rather young curator put his reputation truly out on a limb. I don’t want to go into all of that now, but suffice it to say that the show was hated and ridiculed.

The Whitney Museum of American Art is now thoughtfully revisiting the career and influence of William Eggleston, photography’s Southern, aristocratic gentleman. [The New York Times has published a wonderful review, by critic Holland Cotter. And The New Yorker's resident art critic, Peter Schjeldahl, has also reviewed the show.]

[The Eggleston Trust website has an amazing amount of information. Check out the monographs section for what appears to be a complete list of his major monographs. I'm sure there are numerous smaller catalogues from shows around the world that are not included, though. Also, check out the Articles & Essays section for the full content of things like Szarkowski's published introduction to William Eggleston's Guide, 1976, or Thomas Weski's essay from Los Alamos, published in 2003. A true resource.]