"This programme contains some strong language." "Two photographers are on the road." "Martin Parr and John Gossage make very different kinds of pictures, but the idea of a photographic journey is at the heart of what they both do." "What's that about?" "Yellow Ribbon." "Ah, Yellow Ribbon." "Stop!" "Stop!" "What's the significance of the yellow ribbon?" "It came out of the Iranian hostage situation." "They're on a five-day shoot-out - a photographic exploration of the Misissippi Delta in Memphis, one of the most iconic cities in the American south, but the things that catch their eyes aren't the ones the average tourists would choose." "I'm going to wander around the back." "All right." "See you in 10." "Yeah." "'I have a responsibility, as a documentary photographer, 'to photograph the times we live in, what the world is about now." "'Particularly, in America, it is about the big chain shop, about the big sort of Wal-Mart or whatever." "'My job is to try and capture what's going on." "Now, if you get a great photo as well, that's a bonus.'" "'I look out and say, "I think there's something to be done here."" "'It tends to be places where no other photographers I know ever thin there's anything worth doing.'" "The American photographer Garry Winogrand once said that he took photographs to see what the world looked like photographed." "Photographers have always had this as their mission statement, but the three decades from the 1950s onwards were the real golden age of photographic journeys." "Fuelled by existential restlessness, baby boomer wanderlust and cheap petrol, the photographers set out for new territories to see what these worlds looked like photographed and this is what they discovered." "The desert." "The open road." "The city street." "The beach." "The suburban nowhereville." "The man-altered landscape." "These are the places that photography owns and this is the story of the journeys photographers made to claim them." "Photography always wanted to be on the move even before the technology was really up to it." "When Timothy O'Sullivan penetrated the deserts of the American west in 1867 he brought his dark room with him, pulled by four mules." "Around the same time, the Bisson Brothers employed 25 porters to haul their equipment up the face of Mont Blanc, processing fragile, glass plate negatives in a dark room tent thousands of feet above sea level." "The technology has come a long way since then, but any photographic journey worth making still demands blood, sweat and tears." "They say that Timothy O'Sullivan was a master at profanity and I can believe it, the actual physical work of getting out is often fairly arduous, it involves a scramble, it involves risking snakes and swatting at the bugs." "So it is a struggle, but when you get to the top of the ridge, you've got a whole new scene to work with, and it's thrilling." "It's the greatest satisfaction you're gonna have all day." "So, no, it's...it's the view..." "stupid." "It's an excuse to be in the world really." "Not just looking, that's the crazy part of it, it's being in the world." "This is something I do, I take walks with my camera." "I'm reminded of things I didn't even know I knew, for instance, because some..." "I'm engaged in the world." "I have known this field for the last 45 years and there's something about this field that I've always loved." "Isn't this wild?" "Shit!" "This is what I was telling you about before." "That's part of why I'm interested in this field, cos I'm gonna photograph nature in all four seasons." "And then these sky divers coming down deus ex macchina, you know?" "It's sort of like..." "Oh, here he comes!" "There, he's in the frame now." "The history of photography is made up of journeys great and small, some as epic as a continent, some no longer than a city street..." "..but few have been as influential as one taken by Robert Frank." "It produced a book of photographs that laid bare the soul of 1950s America." "The seminal person absolutely after the war is Robert Frank." "The Americans is one of the most extraordinary paper movies that's ever been made." "Born in switzerland to Jewish parentage, Robert Frank brought an outsider's perspective to bear when he embarked on a nine month road trip of his adopted home in 1956." "Frank got a Guggenheim Fellowship to travel around the United States and document the kind of culture that he saw evolving here which he believed was spreading elsewhere." "He started in New York, travelled south to South Carolina, then onto Texas, to California, then back to Chicago, and finally ending up back in New York." "There was a continuity to the way he travelled - it's not the hop, skip and jump of the world travelling Cartier-Bresson." "He got in a car, he saw the whole thing and he shot every place." "Frank's journey produced the photographic equivalent of the great American novel, laying bare the anxieties that the chrome and the advertising jingles obscured." "Though he'd been trained in a Swiss tradition that aspired to photographic perfectionism," "Frank's free-wheeling odyssey echoed the spontaneity of abstract expressionist art and beat poetry." "He doesn't give a damn if the verticals are straight up and down, because he's standing in the middle of the picture he takes off, and Jackson Pollock stands in the middle of the paintings he makes too." "Again it's the kind of zeitgeist of abstract expressionism, that freedom, that release from the conventions of picture making that were earlier is there with Frank." "Kerouac described it, I think, what he did - he called Frank's qualities agility, mystery, sadness, genius and secret strangeness." "I think those really are the qualities that are there everywhere in those images." "At the end of his road trip, Frank had nearly 700 rolls of film." "He brought his final selection to the french publisher Robert Delpire, and they designed a photo book that would become one of the foundation stones of modern photography." "TRANSLATED:" "He came back to me with a selection and we very quickly did the layout of the book." "People always imagine you need two or three weeks to do that." "We did it in one day." "We spread the whole book out on the floor, as you did at that time, on all fours." "As there were no double page spreads, just one picture after the other, we quickly agreed how the photos should be displayed, and that's how we did it." "He doesn't want you to be distracted by the book - he doesn't want you to look at more than picture at a time." "He doesn't want the eye to jump around." "He wants you to take each one in so that as you turn the page that retinal retention will superimpose one picture on the next one." "Frank wants you, as with a movie projection, to be going through at the same speed so the subtlety of the pictures is what will make the movie, not the mechanical push/pull of the design of the book." "He gives structure very, very cleverly by starting each chapter with an American flag." "And it's the flag that obscures the human face." "From the very first image in the book, the flag is more important." "Along with the American flag, there is a series of crosses, hidden, coded into it all the time." "There's a picture of a Jehovah's Witness and behind him in the stonework is a cross so that he becomes a crucified figure." "So you've got those two symbols as the basic grammar of the book, and it becomes the story of flags and hats and cigars and jukeboxes." "And you realise the whole book is a narrative, a kind of narrative of optimism that's died, the show is over, and Frank understands that beautifully." "The book appeared in France in 1958, and a year later in America with an introduction by Jack Kerouac." "The critics hated what later generations of photographers came to revere." "TRANSLATED:" "It was badly received, something you doubtless know." "It didn't go down well in America where the critics said," ""Who is this insignificant Swiss descending on the Americans," ""coming to explain to them that the 'American Way of Life'" ""isn't as extraordinary as people say?"" "It was like that." "We lost money." "But it wasn't that big a deal." "The kind of book that I do loses money all the time." "So I wasn't surprised." "As if the corrosive poetry of Robert Frank wasn't bad enough," "America also had to contend with the anarchic energy of William Klein." "OK, let's go." "I have exactly six minutes." "If Frank is a Moody Blues, then, then Klein is Bebop." "I mean his rhythm is a lot faster." "What else do you want to know?" "How much money I make?" "Yeah." "He's always on the offensive." "Being aggressive and trying to provoke a situation and being absolutely fearless." "Klein came back to his native New York in 1954 after a six year sabbatical in Paris where he trained as an artist, but this was no prodigal's return in sackcloth and ashes." "How did New York strike you when you went back?" "How did it strike me?" "Right between the eyes." "New York was shitsville, you know?" "It wasn't such a hot..." "wasn't such a big deal." "Can we say on TV that he said he wanted to give America a kick in the balls, cos that's what he said!" "America's so full of shit." "You've got that?" "For a photographer of Klein's aggression and energy, there was one perfect outlet - the street." "Photography discovered its inherent subject in the street." "The landscape photographers and the portrait photographers were, in some ways, more stymie because there was an enormous tradition there that they were trapped in." "But the photographers who worked on the street were willing to wing it, to risk it, make amazing discoveries." "My photographs were, you know, given to the corner drugstore and they came back, you know, thumb marks, smudged and out of focus." "I said "That's typical." "That's the kind of photograph I took."" "But when I had access to a dark room and enlarged the photographs myself," "I realised that the photographs weren't all that bad and you could do something with them." "I could frame them differently, I could print them differently and so on." "That was the first time I realised I could do something with photography." "The street had always been an alluring place for photographers, but to start with, at least, it had proved to be elusive." "Pioneer photographers could record the architecture easily enough, because it kept still, but the life of the street moved too fast for the long exposure times." "In this Paris street scene by Louis Daguerre only the shoeshine man and his client stayed still long enough to leave a trace." "So the first street scenes show artfully staged set-ups... ..or what look like post-apocalyptic ghost towns." "Gradually, the technology caught up." "Citizens evolved from blurs to all too solid flesh, but the camera's struggle to keep pace with life on the streets left a rich legacy." "A visual language of blurs and grain that is unique to photography." "It is a language of stutters and stammers, but Klein made it eloquent." "I like this photograph, it's maybe one of my favourite photographs because I didn't know what I was doing." "I was in the suburbs somewhere, in some waste land, and these kids were fooling around and I said, "Dance."" "And they danced." "And it's only the next day that I realised I like get this kind of blur, a Picasso-like hand, a kid that some TV guy once said, "Oh, I like that kid with the beard."" "And that's what I like about photography." "You can overexpose and underexpose." "You can make everything cockeyed," "but it's not something you would do if you're drawing a portrait or painting a portrait." "And that's what's interesting in photography, it's the accidents." "You can think of Klein as perhaps the first pop photographer." "Klein isn't interested in the image in itself, but he's interested in the way this image can be arranged, cropped, put in different context." "He considered them as raw material." "It's kind of found footage of modern life that he takes into his books." "Everyone is a kind of actor in front of William Klein's lens, everything turned into a kind of show." "Did people mind when you took their photograph?" "Oh, they loved it." "This is New York, you know?" "There used to be a programme called King For A Day and in New York everybody thought somebody was gonna call them up and say," ""Hey, Mr Zeus Bum, how would you like to be king for the day?"" ""No problem."" "Klein had acquired his first camera in a card game at the age of 18, a casual acquisition that would characterise his whole approach to photography." "Trained as a painter in post-war Paris, he felt no respect for photography's sacred cows." "I didn't really dig the French photography, you know, all these photographers now everybody reveres like Doisneau and even Cartier-Besson, completely chic and polite and sentimental, romantic and humanistic." "So I said, "Well, fuck that."" "Klein's idea of a photographer was Arthur Fellig alias Weegee the Famous, the legendary New York tabloid photographer." "I dug Weegee." "He had a police radio in his car and he'd go running to the police station, he'd photograph all these dead Mafia people and so on." "And he had this big 4x5 camera and a big cigar and a big, big mouth." "But he was a real New York icon, and he was great." "He was the photographic eye of the New York City working class." "He was the voice of the people." "He is their poet." "He's very fond of taking pictures of crowds in all kinds of situations - crowds looking at car accidents, crowds looking at movies." "He identifies with the crowd very strongly." "And they are not reserving their emotions." "They're not trying to be cool." "You see every emotion flickering across their faces." "And Weegee is part of that crowd." "He just happens to be one looking at them and poking a camera in their direction." "Like his tabloid hero, William Klein cruised the sidewalks, jabbing his wide angled lens at whoever crossed his path." "This is a photograph that I happened on in the street." "I saw two kids playing cops and robbers and I said - one of them had a gun" " I said, "Hey, look tough."" "Klein has managed to provoke him to an exasperation where the kid just takes the gun and sticks it right into the lens of the camera." "It's so much inside the camera range that it's out of focus." "There's a child in profile also who's sweet and also quite confused-looking and much more intimidated by the whole situation." "And this kid is a little caught in the crossfire." "He makes the picture." "What I felt, at that moment, that it was a self portrait." "Because I was this kid, and I was this kid." "I was timid and afraid of everything, and then I was also a kid who came on pretty strong and I would get into fights and so on." "So I was both." "Great book maker." "He is probably the most internationally influential of any single book maker." "Frank would have never cut up pictures and put six on a page and some in ovals or anything, he would never have been that playful either." "In the '60s, it opened up for photographers around the world to do their city books with that energy." "The one thing Klein had more than anything else is energy." "He got New York too." "I mean, he got the subject, it was the right city to have that degree of energy." "To this day, the sidewalks of New York tempt the ambitious street photographer." "If you can make it there... 5th Avenue is an addiction." "Once you get the drift of it, and feel the energy of it, it makes you wanna go back again and again because it's where life seems to be." "Going out to the street, being in this river of humanity and seeing unexpected incidents occur, how do you make the moment yours?" "How do you become courageous enough to step into the space and take the picture out of it and learn how to confront the oncoming flow of people and insert yourself into it." "Joel Meyerowitz has spent 40 years answering these questions, ever since he threw over a career as an art director after seeing Robert Frank at work." "I have a show coming up and we're publishing a book, and I've got to get this book out, and this is a dummy miniature images so I can make a maquette to see how the book works," "and I've been actually working on this maquette for a couple of weeks." "And if you see anything that you think I should change, you tell me." "to start with, Meyerowitz's ambitions, like so many others, were defined by Cartier-Bresson's much imitated, much misunderstood theory of the decisive moment." "At that time, I was interested in capturing an event because I didn't know any better and that was the language of the period... something happened in space and time, you try to be there and make an interesting shape, any picture about it." "I saw myself as a visual athlete, you know?" "The ball comes!" "The glove is in the right place at the right time." "For example, this is a catch picture, walking on the Pont Neuf or something like that and a man is walking his black and white Capuchin monkey and a woman's coming along with her...in black and white of all things... with her baby in there and the two of them are seeing each other." "Or, you know, just catching a pair of giant shoes walking along the street with people in them, and they run into a girl on crutches who's got a leg in a cast and she does this high kick for them." "I mean, I couldn't have planned that." "It's a kind of lunacy, you know?" "Every camera has a clock on it." "It says a second, it says 1/1000th of a second." "And you can choose to work within those time constraints." "And you actually can experience time." "If you know 1/1000th of a second... you can begin to believe that you see things in that split second." "And if you believe it, you'll begin to see it." "One of the great lessons for me was having absorbed Cartier-Bresson's decisive moment, there came a point when I had to reject it." "And re-imagine it somehow in New York." "Cartier-Bresson's Europe had the sweet organisation of Parisian streets and parks and squares and the elegance of it and the scale of it." "New York is sizzling with energy." "Its skyscrapers and steel and glass and marble and it glitters and it's dynamic." "But big as it is, and dynamic as it is, people are rubbing up against each other all the time." "And they know each other's space." "They can pass within inches of each other without touching." "So it's full of beautiful possibilities, it's all this kind of bull fighting stuff that people do." "And within that is the kind of sexy sense of intimacy." "We come close to each other." "I mean, I like the idea of coming in real close to somebody, and by a gesture or a head turn, sort of dissuade them from thinking I'm photographing them." "So their mindset says "He's not interested in me."" "And so they go blank to me." "When Meyerowitz first began photographing in the early 1960s, 5th Avenue was a happy hunting ground for some of the greatest names in contemporary photography." "Lee Friedlander and Diane Arbus worked these streets, as did Garry Winogrand who became a kind of pack leader for a generation of hungry young street photographers." "He invited me to his place on 93rd Street on the West Side, said "Come on up sometime." "I'll show you some photographs." So, great." "I went, probably the next day, and what I saw was so astonishing." "In his house there were stacks of photographs." "If each of these boxes holds 250 prints," "Garry had stacks that were about hip high." "So that is probably 1,500, 2,000 prints in a stack and there was a stack here and a stack there and a stack..." "I mean, they were all over the place." "And I remember, I came into his living room and I sat down in his rocking chair and he gave me, he said "Here, take a look at these."" "It was amazing to just flip through them." "The wild wit of Garry Winogrand was everywhere, evidence." "It wasn't that I saw a style or a technique but I saw the generosity and the spirit and I thought to myself 'That's it, it's an appetite for life'." "You couldn't feel sorry for yourself around Garry Winogrand, you just couldn't." "When people would go on these trips and there's this whole sob story of going to Mexico and then," ""Oh, we got dysentery and then it was too hot" and it was this and it was that." "And Garry just spoke right over this poor guy and said," ""It sounds like you're talking about your own comfort."" "Which, in New York-speak is to say "Let's move on from there."" "You know?" "What does you own comfort have to do with anything?" "He was the Godfather in some ways." "He was always driven." "He was always obsessed." "When I first met Garry, what I remember is sitting there, after he handed me these pictures he was smoking, he was drinking and he was shaking and tap, tap, tap - his feet were tapping on a chair, and his knees were shaking." "He was like, he was this engine that was throbbing." "It was a kind of nervous energy." "Things responded to his energy." "Photographers who photographed with him have said... ..that things were always happening when he was around, and he'd stop to reload and they'd stop." "And he'd be fully reloaded and ready to go and everything would start happening again." "He was perfectly willing to leer at women with his camera and without, I suspect." "They are about a certain kind of male looking that does go on." "But, at the same time, he also, I think, had a feeling for what kind of woman would respond more positively." "Sometimes sexiness, but sometimes a kind of just bravado - "back at you, buddy."" "You know? "You wanna leer at me?" ""I can leer at you too," you know?" ""And I'm not, you know, I'm not embarrassed by being gorgeous and female" ""any more than you are by being, you know, overweight and a man."" "Winogrand found some of his richest raw material in the zoos of New York." "When I first met Garry he was just going through a divorce - a separation and divorce - and he had two young kids." "And on the weekends, in particular, he would take them to the zoo." "And we'd just go and hang out with the kids." "They would run around and, you know, look at the animals and Garry was looking at the animals." "You could smile all through the book, they're animals, and you see them and then you stop and think, you know, they're heartbreaking photographs." "It's a photograph of the European Brown Bear and it's a sign describing what the bear is and all you see of the bear, the bottom jaw of the bear, reaching up." "This bear doesn't know he's European, he - he doesn't even know that he's a bear." "And it's a totally heartbreaking act." "In Central Park zoo Winogrand made one of his most famous and unsettling images." "A lot of people when they first look at that picture they don't realise until the second or third beat that the guy hasn't got a bab, he's got a chimpanzee in his arms." "They see the interracial couple and they go "Oh, my god, they've had a monkey."" "It's such an outrageous kind of a gag, which is like a bad racist joke." "And that's exactly what Winogrand was aiming at and why he glommed on to moments like that." "He liked to make pictures which he knew would make both the most liberal and educated and the most politically conservative people, make them both kind of upset." "That discomfort, I think, is part of the energy that feeds the photographs." "He did like to kind of startle people out of...what they thought was true." "Among Winogrand's acolytes was the British photographer, Tony Ray-Jones." "Ray-Jones had moved to New York to train as a graphic designer, but like his friend, Joel Meyerowitz, he'd been lured away from the drawing board by the siren call of the street." "Jones' notebooks from the period contained the distilled wisdom of the 1960s street photographer." "Be more aggressive, get more involved, talk to people, stay with the subject, be patient, take simpler pictures." "Don't take boring pictures." "Get in closer." "in 1965 Ray-Jones returned home to see how lessons learnt in America could be applied here." "But in the 60s, Britain was still what was once called" ""a right little, tight little island."" "For the unguarded subjects and spontaneous situations he needed, there was only one place for Tony Ray-Jones to go - the beach." "The place that British photographers have instead of the street." "The tradition of candid British seaside photography goes way back." "In 1896 Paul Martin was in Great Yarmouth with a camera disguised as a brown paper parcel." "The pictures he took showed the magic of the beach at work." "Here at least it was possible to forget for a while what being Victorian meant." "70 years later Ray-Jones turned the beach into a psychiatrist's couch, the place where the nation reclined and bared its soul." "Family dramas." "Displays of eccentricity." "Dreams of love." "The damp disappointments of everyday life." "The beach and the seafront were the stage on which these classic themes were played out." "and Ray-Jones, with his New York trained eye, caught them all." "Going to the seaside was a journey back in time, in a sense, to a country which was still struggling to become modern." "And that's what he wanted to find." "Here was a place where you could record eccentricity and you could record some sort of essence of what people were about." "There's a sort of abandon about the seaside, you know?" "You find people who are performing in a way that they wouldn't do and then in that performance they're revealing something of themselves that they wouldn't normally do." "Inspired by Frank and led by Winogrand, Ray-Jones and the other 5th Avenue photographers engaged directly with life on the street by turning the camera into an extension of their own personalties." "In these pictures the photographer is always a sensed presence, a wry observer guiding the camera, making it see what he sees of the human condition and the human comedy." "But left to its own devices, the camera can be nothing more than a slack-jawed dumb recorder of whatever is put in front of it, which is precisely what Ed Ruscha allowed it to be in a series of seminal books he produced in the 1960s," "milestones in the history of photography and pop art." "I mean, when I grew up, I just know that photographers were either nerds or they were pornographers." "And so... there was no real redeeming social value to somebody who has a camera and takes pictures." "But then as I started seriously working as an artist, travelling was essential, so I was continuously driving back and forth on US 66 between here and Oklahoma when I would take all these gasoline stations." "Ruscha's 26 Gasoline Stations offered an alternative to the humanistic concerns of the street photographers." "They were about things rather than people - surface rather than soul." "Not the human drama of the street but the taken for granted backdrop against which the drama plays out." "I was after that kind of blank reality that that the subject matter would present." "I was met with a little bit of scepticism from some people and usually those people were like... more intellectual, and a lot of those people...uh...were, would have this impression from this little product, that I was putting them on." "But it seemed like somebody who worked in a gasoline station would say "Hey this is great!"" "Ruscha would go onto apply the same deadpan technique to parking lots seen from the air, and all the buildings on Sunset Strip." "I photographed this two and a half miles of this area of Sunset Boulevard called The Strip." "And this was done with an automatic camera mounted in a pickup truck." "And what I was after is some kind of very democratic view of what this entire thing looks like." "Not highlighting anything that is particularly... sociologically interesting or anything," "I would give as much attention to a concrete kerb as I would a building." "How long did it take to photograph all the buildings?" "Oh, this took about..." "a better part of a day to do this." "You did it in a day?" "Mmm." "Yeah." "Oh, I've photographed all of Sunset Boulevard in one day's time." "That's 27 miles." "This is only two and a half miles." "But the deadpan ironies of pop art were not the only new ideas in play in the 1970s." "The biggest change of all came when some photographers began to see the world in a weird new way, in colour." "At the time, colour photography was as shocking as Dylan going electric." "It's hard to really place yourself back in that time but... it was heretical, it just...you didn't do it." "I remember walking into a galleryist in New York City with my work in 1974 and he took a look and he asked me," ""Why are you working in colour?" ""Black and white is so natural."" "Colour photography had been around since the 1860s but had flourished in the parts of photography's empire where commerce trumped art." "Colour was found in advertising, fashion and glossy magazines - the places where photography sinned." "Worst of all, colour was the natural language of the amateur snapshot." "By the 1970s, only SERIOUS art photographers saw the world in black and white." "I had met someone at a party in New York." "And we got to talking and he asked what I did, and I said I was a photographer." "And he said, "Oh, can I see your pictures?" And I opened a box, and as soon as I opened the box he said, "Oh, they're in black and white." And he really... wasn't exposed to art photography" "and that impressed me that he was expecting, when I opened the box, he was expecting to see a colour photograph." "And it shocked him that it was black and white and I thought "What is this?" ""What's this convention about?"" "Serious photography was in black and white." "Martin, you started in black and white." "Yeah, like everybody, really." "In the '70s, it's what you did." "Yeah." "Or before." "'60s, '70s also was harshly expensive seeming." "I mean, you had to have labs involved and you couldn't make your own decent prints." "And it was sort of taken out of your hands when you did colour." "For those able to shake off the convention, working in colour proved revelatory." "Photography's about description." "And so if the camera describes things, then don't you want an instrument that describes more things?" "And there's a certain moment" "I thought colour will describe more than black and white." "When I switched to colour completely I had to work at slower speeds." "Let's say 125th of a second or 250th of a second." "In order to get the depth of field, I had to step back." "When I stepped back, the content changed - it was no longer about something in the centre doing it, it was about everything." "So it's about the tiger in the window." "About the businessman entering the light." "About the blind man and his dog wearing little leather booties." "About this little cascade of women coming across the street with the tinkle of their beautiful legs in sunlight." "It was about the incredible depth of space." "I was trying to bring it altogether in a two-dimensional field." "And I kept saying to myself at the time, "These are field photographs." ""They're overall." ""I'm not making an incident-related thing." ""I'm trying to work without a hierarchy of the catch in the middle" ""and then something else later on."" "Colour didn't just demand aesthetic adjustments, kit also had to be reassessed." "This is, this is an 8 by 10 inch." "This is an 8 by 10 inch camera." "In place of the discreet portable 35 mm cameras, photographers turned to large format view cameras, big enough to capture the fine detail they now craved." "So here's an 8 x 10 inch camera." "It folds open." "You do this." "And this thing... folds open." "And locks and then up comes the front." "And you put a lens in there." "It is the original voice of the medium." "This is the way photography was born, which was a box with a lens on the front and light came in and went onto a piece of film, and this is the size of the film." "So if you're talking about description, this piece of film compared to 35 millimetre." "Here, this is a 35 millimetre piece of film, this is a piece of 8 x 10 inch film." "So if you want authenticity and description and power, spatial power...this." "Street photographers who'd spent the 60s shooting from the hip found themselves trying to keep up with the '70s using 19th century cameras." "but it was another piece of kit, which had been gathering dust in photographers' cupboards for decades, that really changed things." "It also has to do with the tripod." "That it, because it's stationary, that the camera's not an extension of me, it's this tool that I'm fiddling with to make a picture." "And it stays where I made the last decision." "That sounds obvious and silly." "But I could hold a camera like this and, and kind of sway and the framing keeps changing." "Here, this is where it is and then I can think about, and if I want to move it over, I pick it up and move it over a little, and it stays there." "And I can go back and look at it, and think about that decision, and if I wanna crank it up, I can crank it up." "It remembers your last thought." "Yes, it remembers my last thought." "not everything changed, photographers still made journeys out into the world to see what the world looked like photographed." "Travelling conceptually, shooting in colour and often struggling with tripods and heavy view cameras, they sought out the extraordinary in the ordinary." "What I wanted to do was to keep a visual diary of the trip." "And started photographing every person I met." "The beds I slept in." "The toilets I used." "Art on walls." "Every meal I ate." "Store windows." "Residential buildings." "Commercial buildings." "Main streets." "And then anything else that came my way." "And that became the." "framework for, for that series." "I drove in rental cars." "And I don't think they had tape decks at that point." "And so was it just Top 40 radio or wherever the local radio station was, religious stations and country and western stations and sometimes, to entertain myself, I would recite Shakespeare." "And after a couple of days," "I entered a very different kind of psychological state." "I think it has to do with simply keeping my attention focused for hours at a time and watching this road passing." "And I'm focusing straight ahead, and this world keeps passing by." "And after a couple of days of this," "I would be very energised and very clear and very focused." "And that would go on for weeks." "I can tell you what it was like." "You know there I was in this used Volkswagen Camper." "It seems like my tyres were always bald." "I always had $40 and a bag full of sunflower seeds." "And a few boxes of film." "And it was the most exciting time of my life." "Every day, from before dawn to after sunset, I was just fascinated." "You know, I was only making two negatives a day, that's all I could afford." "And you would think that your days would be empty, if you're only pressing the shutter twice, but every second was filled." "Not everyone in the 1970s was braving the open road." "One of the most influential photographers of the period was having his adventures closer to home." "And you've got a fair number of folks." "Yeah." "So that must be his actual grave." "for most of us, Memphis means Elvis Presley, but for photographers 'the king' means William Eggleston." "We think of Bill Eggleston, don't we?" "Yeah, we think of Bill." "Do you think one day Bill's house will be open to the public?" "What do you mean?" "It isn't even open for friends now, I figure out when he's awake!" "Eggleston's reputation rests on the colour photographs he took from the early '70s onwards of his home city Memphis and the surrounding area." "The pictures caused a stir when they were first shown at New York's Museum of Modern Art in 1976, and published subsequently in a book called William Eggleston's Guide." "Inconsequential, indiscriminate and boring to some." "To others, the guide is suffused with a strange, baffling beauty." "Eggleston's pictures contain all the acute observation of a master street photographer like Winogrand, but their brightly coloured surfaces make them as unreadable as one of Ed Ruscha's gas stations." "Eggleston, a man of few words, has called his pictures" ""democratic", adding that he is at war with the obvious." "He took colour at face value." "Bill said "If I just make the colour hierarchy the structure" ""of the picture, can that work and still do realistic subject matter, still do the real world?"" "Do you think he was literally saying that to himself?" "Yeah." "I mean, he extrapolated the whole idea, if pictures need to be structured, how does one structure a colour picture cos colour is more dominant." "That one little red stop light up there trumps this whole large volume area of green." "There's one of a shower stall that would be absolutely nothing." "It's sort of this bilious green and a dreadful pink and it's shot in flash." "And it, it feels, because of the colour, like it's like it's a shower in Auschwitz or something." "It's in some Holiday Inn somewhere." "It's just to have the colour being able to twist the whole content." "Psychological colour." "Yeah." "Eggleston's take is so particular, it's also eminently portable." "Wherever he goes, his world travels with him." "In October 2005 he was persuaded to visit the port of Dunkirk in northern France." "In a landscape of wind blown dunes, steelworks and container ships, far removed from the American south, Eggleston sought out photographic treasure." "So my name is Claire." "C-L-A-R... ..I-R-E." "Thank you very much." "You're welcome." "When Eggleston returned to Dunkirk to open an exhibition devoted to his work, it was a chance for critics and journalists to see if they could turn the pure gold of his pictures into the hard currency of words and explanations." "No." "I have always worked...quite alone." "They didn't get very far." "I've never really thought about that." "Food does exist, sort of like cars exist." "Do you have any particular relation to Edward Hopper's...?" "Edward Hopper?" "Yeah." "No." "Actually it's quite difficult to talk about William Eggleston's work, and he can't tell you the answer either." "Actually not a lot of people are gonna make sense talking about it." "I don't know quite what you mean by that." "Who am I to say?" "Hard to answer." "I regret that that's one of the stupidest questions I've ever been asked." "I like that picture, I don't know why." "I mean that picture's a very intriguing one because that looks like in America in some diner." "But also maybe I like it because it's done here but it looks so...not from here." "And it does look like a painting." "It looks totally abstract and it looks like something... when I'm in a cafe, I see something different in a cafe." "But I can't see that." "That's why I like it." "I'll tell you, I've replied before to a similar question, and the reply..." "I've given in the past" "I still will stick with." "I'm about photographing life today." "Photographers continue to go out into the world in order to photograph life today." "Their motives and their methods vary - colour or black and white." "Lightweight 35 mm versus heavyweight view camera." "Film versus digital." "But what they have in common is a watchful attentiveness to the world and its ways." "They see the things we miss or don't think about and then report back so that we have a chance to think again." "It seems to me photographers are angels not Gods." "Their job is not to create from nothing, but to better understand what is created and to better see the world so that the world is coherent, has meaning, has consequences, significance." "But photography has to build this out of the facts that we all know by walking dirty streets and living in dirty air." "You're not permitted like philosophers or theologians to fly off into the abstract." "And, and I think that's what, frankly, I think that's what has made photography into something of more than usual importance right now." "These places... mean something and part of the job is just trying to find what the hell that is."