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.
These days any self-respecting exhibition of nude photos has to have pornographically explicit images to prove that they
are works of art.
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.
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.
