Eggleston's pictures are in perhaps in part compelling because they have so little representational content. Even though they are ordinarily recognizable images of something, and hence in that sense not abstract, what they depict is frequently not very meaningful. You are left with something that is mainly about marks on a page. Essentially they are abstract, even though they look as if they ought to be representational. It's apparently hard for people to give up on meaning in this context. I wonder if perhaps some of the loneliness and longing that John refers to, and which I see , too, is really lack of meaning that looks as if it were lack of emotional content? I've noticed something similar in my own pictures and suspect that (aside from the fact that I am unfeeling SOB!) it has some relation to a peculiarity in my vision. I'm talking eyes here not creativity! My opthalmologist tells me that I have monocular vision. Even though both my eyes function, I only see at a distance with one of them. This is due to an inability to align the images from both eyes. As a consequence, ordinarily I have no stereoscopic vision and any perception of objects as being located in 3 dimensional visual space comes from other more subtle cues. I don't know how other people see, but it seems to me that this inability probably detracts fairly heavily from the reality and content of what I see. It's also fairly similar to the image a camera creates, basically, flat! I try to comfort myself with this last thought. Anyway, I have much less tendency than a lot of people to try to evoke dimensionality in a photograph. I find I often tend to arrange things in flat layers rather than spread out through the space. I also find that I treat things as not real fairly easily, and often unconsciously. Homage to Bill Eggleston: <http://www.meaningandform.com/photography/images/Memphis.jpg> -- Alan P. Hayes Meaning and Form: Writing, Editing and Document Design Pittsfield, Massachusetts
