Essays On Color

You might have a box of such pictures in your own basement somewhere.How, then, is a fine art photographer shooting in the vernacular style to distinguish her work from just another snapshot?She realized that, in Eggleston’s photographs, she was being confronted with genuine art, though art that seemed to come from a photographic sensibility distinctly different from that of Steichen or Stieglitz or any of the other great photographic Modernists. Not that Eggleston’s aesthetic sensibility rose up .

Tags: Dunkin Donuts Business PlanHanna Wallach ThesisGeography Essay StructureDescriptive Essay About NightmareKutub Khana Essay In UrduYouth In Politics EssayLeadership Research PapersProper Outline For Research PaperService Industry Business Plan

But William Eggleston seemed not to care about such boundaries and distinctions.

He wanted his pictures to be in color, and that was that.

It is said that the great Luxembourgish-American photographer Edward Steichen once took a thousand pictures of the same white teacup.

This was in the days before digital photography, mind you, so the commitment of time and expense was considerable.

Image: Eggleston Artist Trust My copy of Diana and Nikon proves Malcolm’s point; the book is not in color.

So, I’ve seen the shot in black and white and the various colors and patterns do indeed merge into an indecipherable mass. You wouldn’t look at the picture twice in black and white. In color, “an atmosphere of romantic melancholy wafts out of [the] commonplace subject matter.” Colors, according to Malcolm, compliment and add “atmosphere” to what she calls the “commonplace subject matter” of Eggleston’s photography.The result of such studies is a photo like The Little Round Mirror (1901, printed 1905), which is a classic work of early Modernism in photography. The print has so many painterly qualities that it might possibly be taken for one (a painting, that is).Image: Metropolitan Museum of Art () Now fast forward seventy years or so.Who cares about a snapshot an old dog satisfying her thirst in a suburban mud puddle?There were, however, a few critics who immediately saw that William Eggleston was doing something fresh—and potentially exciting.Look, for instance, at Walker Evans’ photo of a gas station: Or Dorothea Lange’s picture of men sitting on a bench in Depression-era San Francisco: This American vernacular style continued into the 1960s ‘street photography’ of photographers like Lee Friedlander and Garry Winogrand.Janet Malcolm calls this “Photo-Realism.” She writes in her “Color” essay that Eggleston takes us deep into Photo-Realist country and that such country “is defined by the presence of recently made structures, machines, and objects; by people dressed in clothes of the cheap, synthetic, democratic sort; by the signs and the leavings of fast food, fast gas, fast obsolescence; by the inclusion of the very parts of the landscape that photographers used to try to eliminate, edging the bridal couple away from the parked cars, angling the lens to exclude the Laundromat sign encroaching on the quiet tree-lined street.” Working within this Photo-Realist tradition, Eggleston’s special contribution was his decision to abandon black and white and shoot his photos in color. If you look at the street shot of a pregnant woman hailing a cab by Garry Winogrand, you’ll notice that there is very little to distinguish the picture from any number of snapshots taken by any number of amateur photographers.It is 1976 and John Szarkowski (the incredibly influential Director of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art from 1962 to 1991) exhibits the photographs of a man named William Eggleston.The show includes a shot (titled, simply, ‘Algiers, Louisiana’) of an aging dog lapping up water from a brown puddle in front of a parked car and a suburban home.Given the short length of time dogs generally spend lapping water, Eggleston couldn’t have had more than minute or so to compose and execute the shot, if that.Image: Eggleston Artist Trust The exhibition of Eggleston’s photographs at Museum of Modern Art therefore caused something of a stir among people interested in art photography.