Thomas Weski, Heinz Liesbrock (Editors)
Distributed Art Publishers: New York
2000
Robert Adams
This is part of Adams' Series The New West, which centres around house development along the Colorado Front in the 1960s and 70s. Many families moved out there to be near nature, but found that the development that was to house them had taken place of the wilderness. The starkness of the image creates a sense of the mass produced which is associated to houses such as this and lawns as impersonal as that. There is a feeling of loneliness in the single silhouetted figure.
Eugene Atget
So, Atget is famous for executing a beautiful black and white survey of Paris at the beginning of the 1900s. His work manages to be both documentary, in the sense of recording the superficial facts of the city's face, but also manage to evoke atmosphere and feeling without relying on a personal narrative. They are still, empty images that are full of the cultural life of the city.
Further info here.
William Eggleston
Much of the writings I've found on Eggleston's work (I've been looking here) discussed his focus on the use of colour. In a 1989 interview with Charles Hagen (that I found on his site under Articles & Essays) Eggleston talks about the importance of colour in his work and the abstract value of photographs, suggesting that a good composition will still be compelling when held upside down, where as a weak composition will not.
I'm not sure how much I believe this, it sounds a little like the poet who said that a good poem should also be able to tell as story when held horizontally and viewed as an image. Which is rubbish.
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