Note sull'episodio
New York, May 1976. MoMA hangs color photographs on its famous white walls for the first time — a tricycle, a freezer, a bare light bulb — and people get angry.
The New York Times reportedly called it the most hated show of the year, and answered the curator's "perfect" with a sentence photographers still quote: perfectly banal, perhaps; perfectly boring, certainly. At the center of the fury stood a thirty-six-year-old Memphis aristocrat with no intention of apologizing. This is our first photographer story on the show — and I owe you a small confession about why he's first. This past January I happened to be in New York while William Eggleston: The Last Dyes was on, and I spent two or three hours giving every photograph as long as it asked for. The color doesn't sit on the paper. It comes up off it.
His story runs from wanting to make "a perfect fake Cartier-Bresson" to a Memphis supermarket lot in 1965, where a young clerk pushing carts through low golden sun became his first true color photograph — by God, it all worked. Then a Chicago lab's price list and the ultimate print: dye-transfer, advertising's most luxurious tool, turned on dirt roads, freezers, and ceilings until they glowed like stained glass. He didn't just photograph the ordinary. He crowned it. And he handed us his battle cry in five words: I am at war with the obvious.
And then there's how he works, and it still won't leave me alone. One frame, one thing — and if he misses? "Then I don't get it. There's always another picture." I'm the machine-gun type of photographer, so that calm, that almost careless grace, has been sitting in the back of my mind since January, and I still haven't finished thinking about it.
Your move this week: one frame, one thing. Find one completely ordinary thing — kitchen, street, desk — and photograph it exactly once. One press, no delete-and-redo. If you don't shoot at all, choose the one thing you'd photograph if you were allowed a single frame. The choosing is the whole game.
Coming Saturday: something this show has never done — one episode, one single photograph. A blood-red ceiling, one bare bulb, three white cords, and a room that no longer exists.
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