Geoff Dyer
[Writer and critic, b. 1958, Cheltenham, England, lives in London.]
[William] Eggleston’s photographs look like they were taken by a Martian who lost the ticket for his flight home and ended up working at a gun shop in a small town near Memphis. On the weekend he searches for the ticket—it must be somewhere—with a haphazard thoroughness that confounds established methods of investigation.
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These days any self-respecting exhibition of nude photos has to have pornographically explicit images to prove that they
are works of art.
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In photography there is no meantime. There was just that moment and now there’s this moment and in between there is nothing. Photography, in a way, is the negation of chronology.
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This is the eternal question about photography, isn’t it: the old who by/what of? Is a photograph defined by what’s in it or by who took it? Well, a bit of both, obviously.
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