Introduction by Charles Gute

Mission District Eggleston Gives Zero Fucks

I think this was around 2006 during a visit to San Francisco. I was staying at my friend Kent’s place and I noticed that the fruit and vegetable drawers in his refrigerator were filled with disposable cameras. I asked Kent what was up with that, and he said that these were all cameras he had carried with him on his daily walks around the Mission District. Once all the pictures in a given camera were taken, he’d put the camera in the refrigerator. Now, I knew that photographers sometimes store unexposed film in the refrigerator, but I’d never heard of storing exposed film in that manner. I ask him if he had any plans to get the film developed, and he said no, not really. That was classic Kent. To this day I’ve never know another artist who was so fully engaged in their creative process but so completely unconcerned with the final product of that process. I asked him if he’d be willing to get the snapshots developed, scan them (they had a scanner at ATA), and email me the jpegs. I didn’t have any idea about what I might do with the images; I just wanted to see them. True to his word, he started sending me jpegs, a few every week or so. They did not disappoint. Having a day job in art publishing, I quickly started thinking about the potential for a book of Kent’s weird street photography. Once he’d sent two hundred or so images, I started sequencing and laying them out in InDesign. Keep in mind, Kent and I never discussed the possibility of my doing this, and he never explicitly gave me permission. And yes, any other artist on the planet would probably have taken issue with someone tinkering with their images without having at least some modicum of control. Kent, however, did not give a flying fuck. 

Eventually I came up with a sequence of 114 images that I felt functioned as a representative sampling of Kent’s Mission District street photography — a sort of mock-up monograph. My idea was to show it to a couple of photography book publishers I knew from my days as a museum store book buyer. All my publishing contacts liked the work, but none of them felt there would be much of a market for it, given Kent’s virtually unknown status. One of these publishers, as a result of our meeting, became interested in my own work and ended up publishing my first monograph — not the outcome I expected. But there were no takers for Kent’s photo project. Eventually I uploaded the mock-up layout to an online self-publishing platform and ordered two softcover copies — one for me and one for Kent. I gave the book a title, a literal description of the contents of one of the photos: The Wig is on the Boulder. I thought the book was incredibly compelling. Without any warning or explanation of any kind, I mailed Kent his copy. I guess I expected some sort of response: a note of appreciation for the interest and effort, or, perhaps more likely, a phone call asking me what the hell I was doing making a book of his work and pitching it to publishers without his permission. In fact he never acknowledged receipt of the book at all. Probably he was too busy taking photos of Mission Street banana peels and refilling his refrigerator drawers with more spent disposable cameras. Truly, he did not give a fuck. 

Charles Gute
August 17, 2026