What Appears Is Good;
What Good Is, Appears.

— Guy Debord

On William Eggleston’s Outlands

Eggleston – Outlands, Steidl can do whatever the F he wants, he can spend the rest of his life doing re-runs of Robert Frank and William Eggleston, subtly shifting the Interpretation of what has already become petrified… (and yet, we still can not move on: In an interview, he sits with the son of Eggleston in a garden and discusses the color of the tiles in his Great-Grandmothers bathroom: They where an under-the-ocean greenish blue, as he point out he clearly remembers. “And we could not believe that, looking at the original negative”, says Steidl here. “And this tint could only be brought back with a careful re-scanning and restoration of the negative, bringing back this eery color”. And this under-the-sea-color is exactly the color of our memory.

But: what to make of this image without this discussion, without this heritage, this baggage? What makes us appreciate an image? The context of its reception? You need someone else to confirm that you may like this picture? If someone else had done it – but here the legend already snaps in: nobody else could have done it. That legend of Eggleston, who always moves into its scenes with absolute confidence and takes only this one and only one picture, the picture he has seen already from miles away (as Jürgen Teller pointed out in one of his adoration-videos)  – as there is only this one definite response to the infinity of looking. And with that, the seal is shut tight.