Customer Reviews

William Eggleston the Hasselblad Award

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William Eggleston's subjects are the blind spots of conventional photographers: puddles, people caught in careless moments neither heroic nor pathetic, nondescript interiors, toys which are neither inviting nor menacing. His photos are rare glimpses into the banal, the forgotten, the liminal: the spaces, moments and people we pass everyday without ever noticing. While many photographers highlight the exotic, the beautiful, the newsworthy or even the grotesque, Eggleston chose to represent and contemplate the 95% of life hidden beneath the surface of "photo-worthiness". He notices what happens in the "in-between" moments- a women's hair lit up by the sun as she stands at a snack stand, someone getting out of a car which has its brake lights still on. He accomplishes something very difficult. Rather than exoticize or beautify the banal, he tries to represent the banal as plainly as possible. This gives his images an amazing luminance, depth and sincerity hard to find in the starved one dimensionality and "obviousness" of most photographs. Most photos are easy. The photographer's intention and message is clearly read and the viewer is instantly gratified. Eggleston makes you work harder. Give this book to your National Geographic loving friends.

This book is an excellent collection of Eggleston's overall body of work, and it is well worth having if you appreciate Eggleston's dictum -- "I am at war with the obvious". I was a bit dismayed to find that the image represented by Amazon.com above is not the actual cover art (man holding gun on bed), although the photo is in the book. The real cover shows a red-headed woman standing at an outside burger stand counter. The back cover shows frozen foods and ice trays stuffed into a freezer (very nice). The images in the book are smaller than in "2 1/4", but the reproduction value is overall excellent (although several images seem too dark to me).

The editor (Gunilla Knape) has done a fine job of representing some of Eggleston's best work, while also including photos that I believe are previously unpublished. Nice index of thumbnail images at the end.

Once while I was in Memphis, I actually passed William Eggleston's house, a sort of two-story Italian Villa house, and actually considered ringing the front door just to meet the guy. Eggleston's photos are of Delta cotton towns, piney woods and red clay dirt roads and blue sky, and they remind me of the time I was growing up in Arkansas, in the 70s and 80s, when Reagan was president and the natives were restless. There's even a photograph of a Krystal's Restaurant on Poplar Avenue where I used to stop to eat mini cheeseburgers. Overall, the photos are a perfect introduction to Eggleston's work. Some may argue them banal and devoid of people and presences, focusing rather on minutia, and things disregarded or thrown aside. I mean, Eggleston's the kind of guy who gets absorbed by throw-aways, like fancy ketchup packs or chewed paper cups on the side of the road in a ditch, and he'll zoom his camera on them to capture the moment. For this guy, no matter how banal, there's still "something" there....Alex Sydorenko, Chicago, January 11, 2001.

"I think William Eggleston invented color photography," said John Szarkowski, the authoritative curator of photography at New York's Museum of Modern Art, around the time of the wildly influential show in 1976 that MoMA staged of this ground-breaking artist.

Now, twenty years later, Eggleston has won the Hasselblad Award and this resultant book is a handsome and solid survey of the photography that changed how photographers looked at the world.