“I am at war with the obvious,” the photographer William Eggleston said in a conversation with the author Mark Holborn, which became the afterward in Eggleston’s 1989 book, “The Democratic Forest.”
In the introduction to the book, Eudora Welty writes that Eggleston’s photographs “focus on the mundane world. But no subject is fuller of implications than the mundane world! When you see what the mundane world so openly and multitudinously affirms, there is everything left to say.”
“At War with the Obvious: Photographs by William Eggleston” is on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through July 28th. The exhibition displays thirty-six prints newly acquired by the museum’s permanent collection. Each work is a dye-transfer print, a process that Eggleston perfected as one of the pioneer color photographers in the late nineteen-sixties and seventies.
While working on an assignment to capture how people made use of the streets in Monterrey, Mexico, photographer Alejandro Cartagena discovered an unusual perspective on commuting.
