Eggleston at the Frist!

I. Love. William. Eggleston.

When I first researched Eggleston before going to see an exhibit of his work at the Frist, I was confused to say the least. His pictures are just snapshots of junk! They are so boring. Not just boring, they are depressingly unspecial. But that's when it hit me. The normalcy of these images is what makes them. Eggleston truly is finding something worth looking at in that which is typically overlooked. His images are ironic. They seem completely unplanned and unposed, yet their subjects read as entirely intentional. Eggleston succeeded in capturing the normalcy of everyday life in Memphis. To say the least, he is the ultimate hipster.

Coming from the perspective of a hopeful photographer, I look at photography with an extremely critical eye. I have spent the past several years in a photography class, being asked to shoot my surroundings and create visual interest out of the things I pass by on a regular basis. After a couple rolls of shooting the same old cliché shots of the fountain and the statues and the belltower, I realized my dilemma; the dilemma every photographer faces: how do I take a picture of something ordinary and make it interesting? How do I capture the essence of the overlooked? How do I give life to things and make people pay attention to something they might not have noticed on their own? This is my goal as a photographer. And I think very few accomplish this goal as thoroughly as Eggleston has.