"At War With the Obvious"
William Eggleston, favorite reads of '23, a good first one of '24, etc.
Not long after I got to Memphis, I picked up a book from my girlfriend’s coffee table, flipped through its photos of everyday Memphian buildings, people, and objects, and felt that thing I sometimes get from art forms I don’t participate in or understand well, a recognition of brilliance without knowing why.
The book was William Eggleston’s Guide. I’d never heard of it or its author, but C explained that he’s something of a Memphis institution. Upon further reading, I found out that the book is a foundational photographic text, the companion piece to his 1976 exhibit at MoMa, which seems to have been a watershed moment in the acceptance of photography—particularly color photography—as art.
I didn’t know Eggleston was famous when I opened the book. I liked the photos for some of the same reasons I like the city they’re mostly of: like Memphis, Eggleston’s photos feel real, unpretentious, ordinary. But they’re also so obviously art, not the casual snapshots they can resemble: their strange framing, lurid depth of color, shabby and unexpected subject matter. Eggleston famously explained his approach in a 1988 interview:
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 … 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.
In John Szarkowski’s essay introducing Guide, he argues, among other things, that we shouldn’t necessarily take Eggleston at face value about his own artistic decisions. I tend to agree: artists rarely have much insight into their own art. One of many reasons I like Szarkowski’s essay is that it speaks to the choices required by any mode of documentary art, especially the choice of content:
Photography is a system of visual editing. At bottom, it is a matter of surrounding with a frame a portion of one's cone of vision, while standing in the right place at the right time. Like chess, or writing, it is a matter of choosing from among given possibilities, but in the case of photography the number of possibilities is not finite but infinite.
As the essay goes on, it becomes more and more specific to photography, and serves as a useful overview of color photography as an artistic form, before situating Eggleston within that history and explaining why his work is so distinctive. It made me want to read Szarkowski’s classic book Looking at Photographs.
A few weeks ago, we watched William Eggleston in the Real World, a 2005 documentary that takes a deeply subjective, ethically complicated view of its subject, with a formal approach that can read at first as artless, even blithe. It offers a critical interpretation of Eggleston’s work while portraying him (perhaps fairly) as odd, reticent, and frequently drunk. The doc feels like an homage to Eggleston’s own work, his insistence on capturing an individual moment in a single shot, elevating the everyday—and even the ugly—into art. I’ve never seen a documentary quite like it.
We spent the next few days trying to take little Egglestonian photos with an Instax camera, with mixed results. It’s not as easy as it looks.
I finished 22 books this year, if my listkeeping was correct, not including the usual thousand-plus pages of work-related reading. That’s two less than last year, and feels like a dismal amount, considering that I had to work less this year than any in recent memory. One potential excuse is that I’ve been traveling, and spent nearly a month of that time driving. Another is that some of the books were dense, challenging, or otherwise time-consuming; I read a few theory or theory-adjacent books, and finally finished Moby-Dick.
Excluding Melville and books in draft/galleys/etc., some highlights: Theodore Allen’s The Invention of the White Race, Vol. 2, Jose Vadí’s Inter State, Daniel Worden’s Neoliberal Nonfictions, Emily Skaja’s Brute, Joy Williams’ The Quick and the Dead, Marcus Wicker’s Silencer.
Some other things I liked this month:
C also recommended to me Dayswork, a novel co-written by Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel, which I’d missed when it came out last summer. The authors are a married couple, and the book itself is about marriage and a middle-aged writer’s obsession with Melville. (It probably helped that I read this a few months after Moby-Dick; one of my favorite parts of Dayswork is a series of passages about other writers’ thoughts on the book, where I was glad to learn that I’m not the only one who took 3+ attempts to complete it.) I love books about obsession, especially if it’s with authors or other books—I wrote one myself—and although I generally don’t love metafictional/autofictional/whatever novels, I tore through this one, finishing it in a few days.
This essay about being one of few working-class people in the publishing industry. The author is British, but I expect it applies to stateside publishing just as well. Sections like this one certainly rang true to American academia:
“In professional publishing, there is a framework of manner and intonation that you can’t quite understand unless you’ve been privy to it from a formative age, and it is a structure born of and for those who have been privately educated or attended Oxbridge or a Russell Group university. One of my most eye-opening experiences as a working class person moving into educated and middle class spaces was the correction to my misconception that wealthy people are clever. I held onto this misconception for longer than I should have, because, at university, and then into my professional life, I was surrounded by the rich.”
The Criterion-watching project has abated a bit, but we did see Yasujirō Ozu’s 1953 masterpiece Tokyo Story, once named the best movie ever made, a slow and subtle and quite long film about nothing more than an elderly couple visiting their grown children in the big city. I’d have to watch it again to understand how and why it’s such a powerful experience despite (because of?) that simplicity, but I’ve found myself thinking about it a lot in the weeks since watching, a phenomenon which has become one of my amateurish metrics for how good a movie is.
I also watched the dark comedy Arizona, which I’d somehow missed or forgotten since it came out in 2018, even though it has a lot in common with my novel-in-progress. The movie has a handful of actors I like—Danny McBride, Rosemarie Dewitt, Kaitlin Olson, David Alan Grier—and is set during and about the late-oughts mortgage crisis, which affected my home state more than most. It does a great job of evoking that era, the simmering class anger and sense of hopelessness. It’s not a classic film by any stretch, but I liked it a lot better than most people seem to.
This post about Book Twitter/social media/etc. by Fernando Sdrigotti, whose Substack I recently stumbled upon. I had almost the exact same experience he describes with Writer Twitter—I joined a bit earlier, in 2009, but also felt it sour sometime in 2016, left shortly thereafter, and don’t post on it or the alternatives for many of the same reasons he outlines. His points about the advent of the algorithm, the “walled garden,” and social media’s life-mediating effects made me think about how many of my social interactions these last few years involve someone ranting about a headline they just read on their phone.
I’m loath to recommend The Wall Street Journal, but my Apple News subscription includes it, and sometimes I like to see what the bankers are reading. And I did think this (paywalled) article about Auburn’s spending was well-reported, damning, and indicative of what’s happening at public schools across the country. It irks me to no end that everyone has an opinion right now about what’s wrong with higher ed—if I’m subjected to one more diatribe about DEI, flames are going to shoot out of my face—but those opinions rarely involve the most obvious issue: it costs too much. And it costs that much because even land-grant schools like Auburn are abandoning the people they’re supposed to serve in order to chase rankings and feed the maws of admin, athletics, and amenities, often at the expense of academic departments. If I were graduating high school now, as a working-class kid from rural Arizona trying to attend the nearest state school on a Pell Grant, I wouldn’t be able to afford college.
As a fan of his who has struggled with both, I appreciated this podcast interview with Bill Hader about how he handles anxiety and impostor syndrome.
I forgot to mention that William Eggleston also makes music. He released a new album a few months ago. It’s sort of off-kilter, instrumental, mostly piano. Not the kind of thing I’d play in the car, but I like it for writing: