Explore Art Search

Exhibitions
Explore Art
Education
Research and Conservation
Publications
Games
About the J. Paul Getty Museum



Previous
Southhaven, Mississippi
Enlarge
© Eggleston Artistic Trust
Gift of Caldecot Chubb

William Eggleston
American, Mississippi, Negative, about 1975, Print, 1980
Dye transfer print
16 x 20 in.
98.XM.230.11

Add to Getty Bookmarks

"I am afraid that there are more people than I can imagine who can go no further than appreciating a picture that is a rectangle with an object in the middle of it which they can identify. They don't care what is around the object as long as nothing interferes with the object itself, right in the center . . . . what they really want to see is a picture with a figure or an object in the middle of it. They want something obvious. The blindness is apparent when someone lets slip the word "snapshot." Ignorance can always be covered by "snapshot." The word has never had any meaning. I am at war with the obvious."

Thus William Eggleston described his philosophy of picture-making. Indeed, the furniture in this home seems to have been assembled expressly to achieve the kind of central focus that Eggleston decried. Yet he chose to carefully place the organ just to the right of the picture's center and to shoot from an unusually low vantage point, so that the furniture seems to loom, holding court in the space.