>>3224072You can’t really say he opened up new avenues for street photography since he’s not a street photographer. Like, a few of his shots are arguably street photography, but most of them are more like [pic related]. Just random junk he spotted that caught his eye.
If you go to the Eggleston trust website, you can see his portfolios come in at about 200 pictures, but there’s maybe ten that people ever point at to show how great Eggleston is. That’s a 5% ratio, and that’s out of his presumably best-of-the-best portfolio-class work. One assumes his portfolio represents a tiny fraction of his overall output. But the portfolio subsets actually posted on the site include just startlingly beginner-quality work, like parking lots, cool clouds, and a poorly exposed picture of a dog. Oh, and at least two more shots of ceiling light fixtures besides the one you think of when you hear Eggleston.
Compare with, say, Ansel Adams. There are a few famous prints everyone thinks of when they think Adams, but when you look at his deep cuts, you see that they’re masterpieces as well. Same goes for most photographers with actual talent. You don’t have to search out needles in haystacks because their publicly available work is a needle stack. That’s not the case with Eggleston.
