>>3143885>It took, if you like, Szarkowski's brilliance as a curator to find these pictures. You know, Eggleston's a very prolific shooter--or he was then. He'd have had thousands of pictures, and Bill himself probably had very little idea which his best pictures were. He needed, if you like, that someone to knock the thing into shape, make it tight, and make it work.--Martin Parr (~37:05 in the documentary)
(Parr, incidentally, is a damn good photographer)
This is really the crux of my argument about Eggleston. The so-called genius of Eggleston was really the brilliance of Szarkowski as a photo editor/curator. Like, Szarkowski was a brilliant man, and wanted to show that even the shittiest photographer could look good if you had a good curator to go through them and pick out the good shots they accidentally got.
All of you talking about Eggleston's genius in being able to spot those hidden gems in a world full of shit and saying how he has the magical ability to get the absolute best, most perfect composition while only taking one and only one photo of each scene are ignoring the fact that BY HIS OWN ADMISSION and BY ALL ACCOUNTS FROM HIS PEERS, he has no fucking clue which of his photos are good and which are shit. He can't tell the difference between a good photo and a bad photo. He doesn't recognize what makes a photo good or bad. He just takes one shot and moves on, and most of the shots are shit, and he doesn't know why and he doesn't even realize they're shit because he has no idea what he's doing.
You can teach a monkey to hit a shutter button. 99% of the time, the photos will be worthless. If you have someone who knows what they're doing go through and look at them, though, every once in a while, you'll pull out a shot like [pic related]. Does that mean the monkey knows what he's doing and is a photographic genius? No, it just means that curation is just as important a skill for a photographer as knowing how to operate a camera.
