Sunday, April 10, 2011

William Eggleston and his way to document the daily human habitat








With his photographs William Eggleston succeeds in documenting the human habitat familiar as well as well as unknown.
He documents his life and his impressions, but it’s everything else than an autobiography in a chronological classification.
There is a lot of interpretations scope for the viewer

At first his photographs look like snapshots of an amateur.
But the photographs of William Eggleston memorize.

Why is it like this?

Is it because of these actually really daily motives?
Is it because of the uncommon perspective in some of his photographs?
Is it because of the eye-catching colors and this special technique called dye-transfer-process?
This technique allows William Eggleston to subjectively control colors like a painter.

I want to get to the bottom of the question, what make these photographs so special and how is it possible not only to document human habitat, rather to describe it.

In the end of my essay I want to compare two different styles of documentary photography. On the one hand there is the photography of William Eggleston; the snapshot documentary.
I think especially in the work William Eggleston we can realize that spontaneous unpredictable things in photography could be really important and could develop a deeper statement.  

On the other hand there is the photography of Bernd and Hilla Becher. They know exactly what they want to show. They know where, when and why.

Finally I can summarize that my essay is going to be an examination of the person William Eggleston, his form of daily documentation of human habitat and a comparison of his work and the work of Bernd and Hilla Becher under the aspect of documentary photography.

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