Untitled, By G. Botsford

Untitled (G. Botsford, 1971)

A banal photograph is essentially a kind of readymade: a common irrelevant everyday object or view placed in an artistic context--somehow relevant to something, but you’re not sure to what. William Eggleston’s photos of the sides of gas stations or of shopping carts or parking lots can be seen as a random frame of consciousness, one second of a day in a world that could contain lots of interesting photos, but were obscured from view, and the photographer is there to attempt to capture them. If photos were always video (and they are now to a large degree), the photographer has the option to select the decisive moment when we might have missed it. These weird photos of nothing have something outside the frame. Sometimes it takes years for them to become relevant, as they document a moment when the people in them pass away, or when the world has otherwise changed.

[Apparently, there is no photographer that I have found by the name of "G. Botsford", and could be the equivalent of "R. Mutt"]

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/07/19/snapshot-work-of-art/