>>3341986>I don't give a damn about the process he had for taking the shot. You seem to think it's bad that he looked at something, decided he liked it, then took a picture.Let me try to spell it out again.
You are arguing that he's not taking pictures of things to take picture of the *thing* but that he's actually working at a higher level to make these masterwork compositions that are all about the color and the aesthetic and the feel of the scene and not actually about the "subject" at all.
I'm arguing that he has no idea what he's doing, he's not thinking about his color composition at all, and that the aesthetic is entirely due to the tools he happened to be using (which, granted, means he made two legitimate artistic choices--the film to use and the printing method to use) and the time period he happened to be shooting in.
As such, his process is central to the argument.
If he puts a lot of thought and work into the photos and gets images that look to me to be exactly the same as a non-photographer would take, then that suggests I'm wrong and there's more there that I'm not seeing.
If he puts no thought into his photos, gets the sort of output that I'd expect to see from someone who put no thought into his photos, and he *tells you* he's putting no thought into his photos and that he can't tell the difference between a good photo and a bad photo, then maybe you have to consider the possibility that we're in a nude emperor situation here?
Eggleston is still alive. He's still taking pictures. Why don't we ever see any Eggleston photos from the last four decades? My theory is that without that patina of age, his photos have nothing.
