Museum Hours

I've been musing about the exhibition which recently closed at the National Portrait Gallery of photographs by William Eggleston . The focus on the quotidian and the mundane and his unsparingly realist aesthetic is nonetheless utterly compelling when presented as art in a gallery. There are no feints just wonderful composition. Yet looking at his pictures put me in mind of David Lynch with all the unsettling, slightly off kilter and quite simply worrying intensity that suggests. Whilst the style is realist and the subjects are familiar the way that objects, but most particularly people, are presented is markedly distinct. I thought at tines that I might have entered the world of Mulholland Drive. There is a constant sense, much sought after by photographers, of having captured a moment with a very clear before and after. The sense that these subjects are caught in the act but also that there is something almost alchemical happening. These moments rarely look comfortable. So