Normally I like photographers whose work is highly composed, often to the point of evident artifice upon closer inspection - Crewdson, Gursky, some Jeff Wall, Cindy Sherman. William Eggleston is an exception, his photos presenting as slices of everyday life, but - as the introductory essay and closing interview with Eggleston in this book more clear - that doesn't mean he was about seeking to represent the world in a straightforward or documentary way. Rather than seeking to capture some defined or self-contained sense of his subjects or the world they inhabit -
It has often been said that Eggleston is at war with the obvious. But the obvious is one area in which the camera excels. Duchamp demonstrated how a thing can be thought of as something other than what it appears to be. Eggleston took this a step further, by showing that the camera, with its unparalleled capacity to record information in exacting detail, does not have to be used for representational purposes, nor do photographs have to be taken at face value. Some early critics expressed frustration that Eggleston's photography reveals little of consequence about Memphis and its environs. But this was precisely the point. Eggleston has never aspired to create social documents or conduct visual surveys. Like Duchamp, his pictures present the banal and the everyday; but unlike Duchamp, they are usually transitory and frequently unsettled, like momentary realisations, or flashes of memory.This book accompanies the British National Portrait Gallery exhibition which came to the NGV in 2017, and I remember many of the photos clearly, especially their vivid colours, as well as the tension between their focus on people - many of them family members and other intimates of the photographer's - and Eggleston's insistence that his photos of people did not express any particular psychological or formal relationship (such as of empathy or expression of worldview) between their human subjects and himself.
