I am at war with the obvious

I am afraid that there are more people than I can imagine who can go no further than appreciating a picture that is a rectangle with an object in the middle of it, which they can identify. They don’t care what is around the object as long as nothing interferes with the object itself, right in the centre. Even after the lessons of Winogrand and Friedlander, they don’t get it. They respect their work because they are told by respectable institutions that they are important artists, but what they really want to see is a picture with a figure or an object in the middle of it. They want something obvious. The blindness is apparent when someone lets slip the word ‘snapshot’. Ignorance can always be covered by ‘snapshot’. The word has never had any meaning. I am at war with the obvious.

— William Eggleston, from a conversation with Mark Holborn, Greenwood, Mississippi, February 1988


And being a “volume guy” is not necessarily a bad thing. But has this changed now? The light in California and Washington triggering some kind of chemical reaction, resulting in all these futile Eggleston-flashbacks. I wanted to shoot less and give every shot more meaning, instead the opposite happened, I am just this slave submitted by his urges to the desire of the machine to see…

And what does democratic forest mean in a post-democratic society, where democracy has become a more and more dubious concept? And are you not bored by this endless stream of well-composed, colorful, over-processed images? Where the images do not make more sense of the world than there already is, which is very close to none at all? And we want the artist to do what? Make sense in the sense of producing it out of nothing? And post-democracy meaning some kind of death heat of public opinion, where we all look at the same pictures over and over again, our tastebuds being shaped by algorithms and market-mechanisms, and we all are becoming more and more alike…

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