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Every day Flak Photo features a new photo, which shows up on my Facebook Home page. Today it was this image by Susan Worsham. There’s some really interesting, odd and inspiring work on her website.
“SOME FOX TRAILS IN VIRGINIA
This series of photographs is taken in and around Virginia, the place in which I grew up. The title comes from a book written by my father’s ancestor, to show the lineage of the Fox family in Virginia. For my own purpose, it acts as a metaphorical map, of the rediscovered paths of my childhood home.
At the age of 34, I came back to Virginia to care for my mother, who died shortly after my return. As the last of my family passed, I turned my lens to old friends, and their new families. I photographed the house in which I grew up. The man that lives there now houses snakes in my father’s old office, and rests them in my old bedroom, while he changes their cages. My mother always promised that there were no snakes in my room, and now that she is gone, there are.”
I’m a huge fan of William Eggleston. His images have this sort of poetic imperfection about them, the way the objects are positioned slightly off beat, curious, beautiful, fragile. It took ages for Eggleston to get the recognition he deserved (or even commercial success).
“William Eggleston (born July 27, 1939 in Memphis, Tennessee) is an American photographer. He is widely credited with securing recognition for color photography as a legitimate artistic medium to display in art galleries.
Egglestons father was an engineer who had failed as a cotton farmer, and his mother was the daughter of a prominent local judge. As a boy, Eggleston was introverted; he enjoyed playing the piano, drawing, and working with electronics. From an early age, he was also drawn to visual media, and reportedly enjoyed buying postcards and cutting out pictures from magazines. As a child, Eggleston was also interested in audio technology.
Eggleston’s early photographic efforts were inspired by the work of Swiss-born photographer Robert Frank, and by French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson’.
Eggleston began experimenting with color in 1965 and 1966; color transparency film became his dominant medium in the later sixties.
Eggleston’s development as a photographer seems to have taken place in relative isolation from other artists. In an interview, John Szarkowski of New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) describes his first, 1969 encounter with the young Eggleston as being “absolutely out of the blue”. After reviewing Eggleston’s work (which he recalled as a suitcase full of “drugstore” color prints) Szarkowski prevailed upon the Photography Committee of MOMA to buy one of Eggleston’s photographs.
In 1970, Eggleston’s friend William Christenberry introduced him to Walter Hopps, director of Washington, D.C.’s Corcoran Gallery. Hopps later reported being “stunned” by Eggleston’s work: “I had never seen anything like it.”
Eggleston’s mature work is characterized by its ordinary subject-matter. As Eudora Welty noted in her introduction to The Democratic Forest, an Eggleston photograph might include “old tyres, Dr Pepper machines, discarded air-conditioners, vending machines, empty and dirty Coca-Cola bottles, torn posters, power poles and power wires, street barricades, one-way signs, detour signs, No Parking signs, parking meters and palm trees crowding the same curb.”
William Eggleston in the real world. 2005 documentary by Michael Almereyda
God Damn That’s A Good Looking Blue”: Winston Eggleston on William Eggleston, from 2008. Film and interview directed by: Douglas Sloan Courtesy.
