Clicks in your Chest

I ask if he likes to talk about photography. Eggleston closes his eyes. “It’s tricky,” he says. “Words and pictures don’t — they’re like two different animals. They don’t particularly like each other.”

I mention that for decades people have studied his compositions, the geometry of his images, which seem to grow more complex the more you look. But this sort of analysis of his work strikes Eggleston as “nonsense.” Photography is second nature to him — intuitive not analytical. “I know they’re there, the angles and compositions,” he says. “Every little minute thing works with every other one there. All of these images are composed. They’re little paintings to me.”

Eggleston’s images can trick you if you’re not careful. You have to look at them, then you have to look again and then keep looking until the reason he took the picture kind of clicks in your chest. In one photograph, taken in the mid-1970s, a beautiful boy — his son Winston — sits in a padded restaurant booth looking down at a magazine. Printed on both pages of the magazine (upside down to the viewer) are guns. The image is a one-two punch. The innocence of the boy breaks your heart; what he’s reading then stops it for a beat. I tell him, “When I look at it, it makes me hold my breath a little bit. Do you know what I mean?” He says, simply, “I do. I feel the same way. I think that’s an incredibly wonderful picture. I don’t know why.”

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