"I am at war with the obvious" - William Eggleston

William Eggleston in Paris 

"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 centre. Even after the lessons of Winograd and Friedlander, they don't get it. They respect their work because they are told by respectable institutions that they are important artists, but what they really want is 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'. The word has never had any meaning. I am at war with the obvious."    

"Sometimes I like the idea of making a picture that does not look like a human picture. Humans make pictures which tend to be about five feet above the ground looking horizontally. I like very fast flying insects moving all over and I wonder what their view is from moment to moment. I have made a few pictures which show that physical viewpoint. I photographed a stuffed animal in an attempt to make a picture as if the family pet were holding a camera - from a dog or cats point of view."