The subject of many of the images are everyday things - a freezer full of processed food items, shoes under a bed, a truck, a ceiling fan, trees, roads, intersections, plastic dolls, a plush toy animal. Stuff that you might encounter in any typical 20th century American life. Many critics gush about Eggleston’s colors, but what is perhaps most impressive about his images is their ordinariness. What he seems to show us is that the world is visually complex, that all these ordinary things are actually quite extraordinary if we take the time to look. Weski tacks a decontextualized quote to the end of his essay that appears confusing: “I am at war with the obvious.” I take Eggleston to mean he’s not trying to obviate or overcome the obvious, but at pains to show how the obvious is anything but. Images of Atlanta evoked a bit of nostalgia. Others I found too simple and pedestrian, such as the stuffed toy animal in a chair, or the gargoyle statues. But in many of the images I see reflected some of my own photographic interests - planes and geometric forms of buildings, shadow and light, splashes of color, an interest less in people than in things and a way of looking.
While searching for some Eggleston images, I came across this article, which not only reviews Chromes but discusses what we can learn from Eggleston.
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