William Eggleston’s particular brand of mad genius has recently been filtered by Michael Almereyda’s combing of the Eggleston Archives and published as a book.  Twin Palm’s “William Eggleston: For Now” feels exactly like that to me…the dumbing down of an inaccessible genius by a third party.  I know that other’s like Szarkowski have curated Eggleston’s work to much success…but this time it just doesn’t work.  Perhaps I am missing the point of a fresh eye finding hidden themes in Eggleston’s unseen work (Eggleston is himself, evidently satisfied calling it a sort of ‘family album’) but it feels to contrived to me.  More portraits than I’d expect and the surreal moments Mr. Eggleston normally pulls from nowwhere feel like attempts at identifying surreal moments instead of actually being them.  

That being said it’s still awesome to look at pictures made by the Lee Perry of photography.

It’s crazy how awesome Manuel Alvarez Bravo’s work is…and how so few seem to appreciate his entire body of work.  It seems to me that he is work is often compartmentalized by his fans…there seem to be those that think only of his landscape work, or his nudes, or those who think of him as a street photographer and others that think of him as a visual anthropologist.  However you some may categorize it…it’s all surreal and very good.

Here are some that were new to me.

newyorker:

Among the Yakuza: Haruto Hoshi Photographs Jake Adelstein

For Peter Hessler’s profile of the American crime reporter Jake Adelstein in the January 9th issue of the magazine, the photographer Haruto Hoshi shadowed Adelstein through the Tokyo underworld about which he writes. Hoshi was an obvious choice to photograph Adelstein. While in his late twenties, Hoshi sold drugs for his best friend, who had recently joined the yakuza. Unhappy with the direction his life had taken, Hoshi was unsure how to right his path without abandoning his friend. Fate and the police intervened, and Hoshi was arrested and served time in prison. It was during his incarceration that he first considered becoming a photographer, and upon his release he enrolled in night school. The rest, as they say, is hisutori.

We asked Adelstein to caption Hoshi’s photos from their time together, and he kindly obliged. For more photographs, with Adelstein’s captions: http://nyr.kr/xjGJ3U

More from my upcoming found photo/assemblage project.

hopefully some of the assemblage parts will be revealed here or on saidandseenplus sooner than later.

© Moises Somon covering the last days of Gaddafi