Huger Foote: My Friend from Memphis

Rating:
Summary: Huger Foote: My Friend from Memphis by Huger Foote
Review: Extraordinary vision as an artist....right along the lines of Eggleston, Winnogrand, and Friedlander. This book is about fine art color photography, not your typical National Geographic obvious photo's. It is about seeing....there is much that is left to be said and done in photography, Huger Foote like his mentor William Eggleston is well on his way to saying things from a different perspective. Huger Foote apparently like many great artists "feeds" off of other great artists to produce a way of seeing that is simply brilliant. He too, like Eggleston, "is at war with the obvious".

Rating:
Summary: Huger Foote: My Friend from Memphis by Huger Foote
Review: Extraordinary vision as an artist....right along the lines of Eggleston, Winnogrand, and Friedlander. This book is about fine art color photography, not your typical National Geographic obvious photo's. It is about seeing....there is much that is left to be said and done in photography, Huger Foote like his mentor William Eggleston is well on his way to saying things from a different perspective. Huger Foote apparently like many great artists "feeds" off of other great artists to produce a way of seeing that is simply brilliant. He too, like Eggleston, "is at war with the obvious".

Rating:
Summary: Original and Brilliant
Review: I'm not a real art critic and Huger Foote's photography is very difficult to describe, but I'll do my best. The book is a collection of "walking around" images, taken on the streets and back roads of Memphis. These are mostly reproductions of pigment transfer prints, with some conventional color prints as well.

To me, the photographs work on a couple of different levels. In a sense, they are like abstract painting: the idea that the artist is better able to communicate when freed from the constraint that his work must represent anything in the real world. Photography is inherently representational, of course, and these photographs are straight representations of real scenes, but Foote, to paraphrase one of the book's introductions, doesn't so much take pictures of things as he uses things to make pictures.

The photos are mostly taken at odd angles, crop scenes in unconventional ways and generally lack an identifiable primary subject. This is because the print itself is both subject and object, and Foote wants you to judge the image on its own merits, as a two-dimensional color composition, rather than for how well it presents a real-world object.

Still, the real-world scene is there, and your mind can't help but jump back and forth between abstract consideration of the print and interpretation of the photograph. It's this balancing act, this duality that makes Footes images among the best contemporary photography has to offer.

Oh, and yes, the photos are gorgeous.

Rating:
Summary: Original and Brilliant
Review: I'm not a real art critic and Huger Foote's photography is very difficult to describe, but I'll do my best. The book is a collection of "walking around" images, taken on the streets and back roads of Memphis. These are mostly reproductions of pigment transfer prints, with some conventional color prints as well.

To me, the photographs work on a couple of different levels. In a sense, they are like abstract painting: the idea that the artist is better able to communicate when freed from the constraint that his work must represent anything in the real world. Photography is inherently representational, of course, and these photographs are straight representations of real scenes, but Foote, to paraphrase one of the book's introductions, doesn't so much take pictures of things as he uses things to make pictures.

The photos are mostly taken at odd angles, crop scenes in unconventional ways and generally lack an identifiable primary subject. This is because the print itself is both subject and object, and Foote wants you to judge the image on its own merits, as a two-dimensional color composition, rather than for how well it presents a real-world object.

Still, the real-world scene is there, and your mind can't help but jump back and forth between abstract consideration of the print and interpretation of the photograph. It's this balancing act, this duality that makes Footes images among the best contemporary photography has to offer.

Oh, and yes, the photos are gorgeous.