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BBC documentary on William Eggleston


Nick De Marco

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I too enjoyed the documentary and have long been a fan of Eggleston's work - to those who remain unconvinced I encourage you to look again and, as the documentary suggested, look carefully at the composition, colours, patterns as well as the surface subjects. They're photographs of nothingness but are not random snapshots and approaching them in that way proved most helpful to me in beginning to appreciate a different style of photography from my own.

 

The other things I took away from the documentary were the importance of light in his work - he works under that bright southern sun and was shown to be active in either early morning or evening (it wasn't clear which) when the angle of the light is more interesting. The other was the importance of the processing of the photographs - he specifically uses a special colour printing method (dye transfer?) which produces such intense colours.

 

The one thing I didn't understand was why he used a motordrive on the Leica when his style is carefully taking one shot at a time - to me it would add weight and made more curious his fitment of the M3 lever for film advance onto the black M6/7 body.

 

I'd like to know more both about his exposure technique and choice of film - my guess is that from his use of red in his photographs that he's a Kodachrome man - I wonder what he'll go onto next?

 

Think I'll load some colour film into my camera this weekend, walk round the neighbourhood and try my own little homage to Egg in south-east London.

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Well from what I saw in the film he takes photographs very quickly and does not spend much time on in-viewfinder composition. Perhaps he sees very quickly.

 

His photographs are not 'picturesque' and they are different. I suppose we all think that we can just pop out into the street and take the same stuff. Is that true, probably not.

 

Jeff

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I didn't see the documentary, as I can't access the BBC iPlayer in Germany :( but after the discussion here I decided to look at the film Willam Eggleston in the real world, which I found very interesting.

 

I'm also very interested in his style - I have been a fan of Martin Parr for a lot of years and would assume that Martin was influenced by Eggleston's work as there are similarities in the style - at least to my eyes.

 

Are those who are not particularly inspired by Egglestons work, equally uninspired by Parr?

 

Mark.

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I'd agree that it might have been a 35/1.2 as it's a big lens, too big to be a 28mm, but I don't know if the lens hood is right for that lens and I thought they were normally black. .

 

It's definitely a chrome CV 35mm 1.2. Most were indeed black, but a very limited number were made in chrome for a short production run; I have one of these chrome ones. The supplied hood is black.

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Like Martin Parr (who incidentally uses a Canon 5D nowadays) Eggleston is never going to be to everyone's taste. But he is very important historically and that's why he's in galleries and collections and we're not.

 

Don't forget he was doing his thing (and it is so obviously his thing) 30+ years ago and his influence is massive on contemporary photography. I realise many here probably aren't that taken with a lot of contemporary photography.

 

He is also quite an 'interesting' character – most photographers probably wouldn't be great subjects for TV programmes. I'm not saying there's not a load of codswallop talked sometimes about art photography, but Egglestone's use of colour, choice of banal subjects (which in his photographs often looks so weird) is at the very least worth thinking about. If you begin to 'get' what he's doing, it's also a very hard style to copy.

 

I think the discussion about his choice of equipment at least proves cameras have very little to do with photography ;-)

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I really like his views on contemplative review of his photos and people looking for inner meaning and other art codswallop (As a Brit, I miss that term!). Any man who can look you straight in the eye and state that they're "just pictures" and that he didn't really think much about them at the time other than they looked interesting, has my respect.

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I suppose we all think that we can just pop out into the street and take the same stuff. Is that true, probably not.

Jeff

 

I can confirm from personal experience that I was unable to pop out into the street and take the same stuff. It looked different and not nearly as good.

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I can confirm from personal experience that I was unable to pop out into the street and take the same stuff. It looked different and not nearly as good.

 

I hate it when that happens. Same thing occurred when I tried to be Ansel Adams too :D (I can shoot a technically decent landscape when I need to, including with decent light but that artistic difference although objectively minor, subjectively is HUGE).

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