Getty Museum

Southhaven, Mississippi

Date

negative about 1975; print 1980

Medium

Dye imbibition print

Culture

American

Department

Photographs

Institution

Getty Museum

>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 center . . . . 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. Thus William Eggleston described his philosophy of picture-making. Indeed, the furniture in this home seems to have been assembled expressly to achieve the kind of central focus that Eggleston decried. Yet he chose to carefully place the organ just to the right of the picture's center and to shoot from an unusually low vantage point, so that the furniture seems to loom, holding court in the space.

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