Something to Look At

Here's a photo:

Who took it? It looks kinda like a particular guy. Kinda.

This showed up on twitter, Dr. John Edwin Mason, professor of history, was doing a little performance of hand wringing about how he tries to resist Eggleston, but cannot always do so. Eggleston is officially Out Of Favor because he's rich, white, and Southern (and, possibly, an unrepentant racist, I simply don't care enough about what random ancient white southerners think to look it up.)

What do we see here?

This is an extremely formal picture. The extreme near/far trope is deployed, quite accurately, here. The figure of the woman is almost exactly the size of the tail light, and almost perfectly aligned with it. Most of the car is colored by way of reflection. We can see the sky, and the pink ground (carpet? see the tire marks?) in the chrome of the tail-light and the rear bumper. The car itself appears to be a cream or white, but it's hard to tell because the pink material underneath so dominates. The model is wearing a black fur coat, and some sort of outré gloves in white, and a light toned shoe also peeks out under the floor length coat.

The styling of the tail light and the model's beehive date the photograph to the 1960s. A Cadillac buff would be able to tell you the year of the car instantly, but it's certainly neither 50s not 70s, generally.

The tire marks in the ground material are interesting. I'd expect the styling team to smooth those out, but they do rather fill in that corner of the frame, and I think they work. They help make sense of the car.

There is a little triangle of sky upper right, doing the same work as the tire marks, as well as inserting a blue to complete the pink/blue complementary color palette, and which sky is also reflected in the tail light for a certain pleasing symmetry. The sheer formal structure visible in this thing is really fun.

This is recognizably a fashion-styled photograph. The model and the structured formality of the frame can mean nothing else.

Indeed, this is from the pages of Vogue, 1965, shot by Gene Laurents.

What makes this whole story amusing is that when Dr. Mason encountered it and had his little crisis, the photo was in fact attributed to Eggleston, and he assumed that was correct.

Dr. Mason is a charter member of the modern school of photo theory, and therefore seems to believe that things like the photographer's gender and skin color can be determined by examining the photo via the dialectic of "gaze."

And yet, here we have him unable to even notice that this definitely isn't an Eggleston. The photo looks like an Eggleston for two reasons: it's colorful, and it uses the extreme near/far trope that Eggleston used in his most famous photo, but seems to have never used again. Eggleston is not near/far guy, he is gritty urban color guy. This photo is neither gritty not urban. This photo looks absolutely nothing like an Eggleston.

On the one hand, I am inclined to give Dr. Mason a mulligan here, because it's twitter, and there was the attribution. Even on twitter we tend to believe attributions.

On the other hand, Dr. Mason discovered that it's not an Eggleston after all, but a Gene Laurents (who for all we know is also an unreconstructed racist), and declared then that he now loved the picture. This is in part jokey performance, but based on Dr. Mason's past remarks, I ascribe a lot of literal truth to these current remarks.

Dr. Mason is absolutely unrepentant about the fact that he judges pictures not on anything visible in them, but based on who he thinks shot it. It is in fact clear that he didn't really look at the picture closely or seriously, he saw the wash of color and the shine, and wanted to love it, but couldn't because Eggleston, and now it's ok to love it because some rando took it instead. This is not exactly critical engagement. This is a crude social performance to signal that he, Dr. Mason, still considers Eggleston to be Out Of Favor.

This gives us, I think, an interesting view into this world of photo theory.