Books by William Eggleston
William Eggleston, 2 1/4
A tribute to Eggleston’s brief experimentation with pocket-sized photographs
Born and raised in Mississippi and Tennessee, photographer William Eggleston began taking pictures in the early 1960s after reading Henri Cartier-Bresson’s The Decisive Moment. After switching from black-and-white film to color film in 1966, he occasionally used a two and one quarter inch format for photographs. This collection of square snapshots from 1966 to 1971 invokes the intimate quality of Eggleston’s work, while maintaining the vibrance and skill that led Museum of Modern Art curator John Szarkowski to call him “the first color photographer.” This attractive clothbound, square-shaped hardcover volume includes 45 four-color plates with text by Los-Angeles based novelist and screenwriter Bruce Wagner. Now in its eighth edition, 2 ¼ adds more classic Eggleston images to the canon of color photography.
William Eggleston (born 1939) encountered photography and abstract expressionism while studying at Vanderbilt and the University of Mississippi. Inspired by the work of Robert Frank and Henri Cartier-Bresson, Eggleston began working with color film in the 1960s and is credited with popularizing its use among artistic photographers. His work can be found in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
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Stranded in Canton
William Eggleston's pioneering video work, Stranded In Canton, has been restored and is finally available, almost thirty-five years after it was made. The book contains forty frame enlargements from the digital remaster, an appreciation by Gus Van Sant, and a DVD of the seventy-seven-minute film itself, along with more than thirty minutes of bonus footage and an interview with Mr. Eggleston conducted at the 2005 Toronto Film Festival.
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$50.00
5 X 7
Never-before-seen black-and-white nightclub photographs enliven the typical Eggleston oeuvre
This monograph on American photographer William Eggleston highlights his photos taken on a large-format 5 x 7 camera in the early 1970s. It features both color and black-and-white photographs, the latter of which are a never-before-seen series of portraits taken inside the nightclubs that Eggleston frequented. Museum director and contemporary art curator Walter Hopps―an early champion for Eggleston―characterized these images as “offhand and spontaneous but insistently stark; their brutality is heightened by the absence of color.” The volume also features Eggleston in conversation with filmmaker Michael Almereyda, who directed a documentary on the artist in 2005.
William Eggleston (born 1939) encountered photography and abstract expressionism while studying at Vanderbilt and the University of Mississippi. Inspired by the work of Robert Frank and Henri Cartier-Bresson, Eggleston began working with color film in the 1960s and is credited with popularizing its use among artistic photographers. His work can be found in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Michael Almereyda (born 1959) originally studied art history at Harvard before leaving the university to pursue filmmaking. He is best known for his 2000 adaptation of Hamlet starring Ethan Hawke and Julia Stiles. His 2005 documentary William Eggleston in the Real World was nominated for a Gotham Award.
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$75.00
William Eggleston: Postcard Box
Color photographs by William Eggleston. Twenty-five different 4 1/4 x 6 in. postcards in an imprinted box.
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William Eggleston: The Outlands: Selected Works
by Rachel Kushner, William Eggleston, Robert Slifkin
A selection of nearly one hundred previously unseen images from the 1960s and 1970s by the pioneer of color photography, William Eggleston.
The Outlands, a series of photographs taken by Eggleston between 1969 and 1974, establishes the groundbreaking visual themes and lexicon that the artist would continue to develop for decades to come. The work offers a journey through the mythic and evolving American South, seen through the artist’s lens: vibrant colors and a profound sense of nostalgia echo throughout Eggleston’s breathtaking oeuvre. His motifs of signage, cars, and roadside scenes create an iconography of American vistas that inspired a generation of photographers. With its in-depth selection of unforgettable images—a wood-paneled station wagon, doors flung open, parked in an expansive rural setting; the artist’s grandmother in the moody interior of their family’s Sumner, Mississippi home—The Outlands is emblematic of Eggleston’s dynamic, experimental practice. The breadth of work reenergizes his iconic landscapes and forms a new perspective of the American South in transition.
Accompanying the ninety brilliant Kodachrome images and details, a literary, fictional text by the critically acclaimed author Rachel Kushner imagines a story of hitchhikers trekking through the Deep South. New scholarship by Robert Slifkin reframes the art-historical significance of Eggleston’s oeuvre, proposing affinities with work by Marcel Duchamp, Dan Graham, Jasper Johns, and Robert Smithson. A foreword by William Eggleston III offers important insights into the process of selecting and sequencing this series of images.
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$95.00
William Eggleston: Paris
For photographers, the city of Paris must constitute a genre of its own (alongside "nudes" or "botanical"), so perennially photogenic are its streets, skylines, storefronts and people. Here, William Eggleston--"The Father of Color Photography"--offers a brilliant, unusual take on Paris today, with depictions that completely revitalize our sense of this most picturesque of cities. Eggleston spent three years working throughout different seasons, to craft images that reveal surprising and rarely-seen facets of the city, as one might expect from the lens of a photographer most associated with the American South. Eggleston constructs with color--the brilliant yellow of a shop front, the intense blue of a street sign, the carnival colors on a merry-go-round--and of course with little gems of detail--plastic flowers in a shop window, a plastic bag or a woman's supersaturated red shoes--locating effects that are simultaneously rustic and cosmopolitan, glamorous and gritty, everyday and extraordinary. The first print appearance of this new work, Paris is published for Eggleston's exhibition at Paris's Fondation Cartier, and also includes paintings juxtaposed with the photographs that inspired them. His Paris is a triumphant successor to Eugène Atget and Henri Cartier-Bresson.
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Los Alamos
"I had this notion of what I called a democratic way of looking around, that nothing was more or less important," William Eggleston once said. This radical attitude guided his ground-breaking work in color photography, work that has prefigured many recent developments in art and photography. Los Alamos presents a series of photographs that has never before been shown, yet it contains a blueprint of Eggleston's aesthetics, his subtle use of subdued color hues, the casual elegance of his trenchant observations of the mysteries of the mundane. The photographs in Los Alamos were shot in Eggleston's native Memphis and on countless road trips across the American South from 1964 to 1968 and from 1972 to 1974. Initially, Eggleston wanted to create a vast compendium of more than 2000 photographs to be contained in 20 volumes; he wanted the viewer to look at the photographs the way one looks at the world. He eventually abandoned this project--and hardly any of the negatives were ever printed. Now, 30 years later, we finally get to see a selection of this encyclopedia of Southern everyday life and vernacular culture. It's a stunning discovery that makes the so-called snapshot photography of recent years pale in comparison. Eggleston's astonishingly timeless portraits, still lives, landscapes, and photographs of buildings add up to a profound investigation of the world and our way of looking at it, a poetics of pleasures hidden in full view. They transcend the merely descriptive and uncover the universal encapsulated in the details and the detritus of life in a consumer culture. Published in collaboration with Museum Ludwig, Cologne.
One of the few genuises in photography. --Andy Grundberg
The world is so visually complicated that the word "banal" scarcely is very intelligent to use. All days are similar, no matter what part of this planet we're in. --William Eggleston
Essays by Walter Hopps and Thomas Weski.
Hardcover, 11.75 x 11 in., 224 pages, 97 color illustrations
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Los Alamos Revisited
Los Alamos Revisited contains the definitive edit of William Eggleston's celebrated Los Alamos series, and closes a fascinating photographic story that began in the mid-1960s. Between 1965 and 1974, William Eggleston and Walter Hopps drove together through the USA, Eggleston taking photographs, Hopps at the wheel. During these travels the title Los Alamos was born. More than 30 years later Eggleston, Hopps, Caldecot Chubb and the photographer's son Winston Eggleston edited the photographs into a set of five portfolio boxes of dye-transfer prints. Hopps' original vision was to create a vast Los Alamos exhibition, but the negatives became separated, with Hopps retaining only about half. He later returned what was thought to be the remaining negatives to the Eggleston Artistic Trust in Memphis where they were catalogued as Box #17. After Hopps' death in 2005, another long-lost box of negatives was discovered. These were catalogued as Box #83 and documented in a handmade reference book called Lost and Found Los Alamos. In 2011, the photographer's son William Eggleston III and Mark Holborn reviewed the now complete set of negatives, finalizing the sequence with Winston Eggleston at Steidl in 2012. Los Alamos Revisited presents this sequence in its entirety, and updates the 2003 Scalo book Los Alamos.
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William Eggleston: Chromes
by Thomas Weski, William Eggleston
William Eggleston's standing as one of the great masters of color photography is widely acknowledged. But the gradual steps by which he transformed from an unknown into a leading artist are less well known. Steidl has undertaken to trace these steps in an ambitious series of publications. Before Color explored Eggleston's revelatory early black-and-white images, while Chromes selects from more than 5,000 Kodachromes and Ektachromes taken from ten chronologically ordered binders found in a safe in the Eggleston Artistic Trust. This archive had once been used by John Szarkowski, who selected the 48 images printed in the seminal book William Eggleston's Guide, while the rest of the archive has remained almost entirely unpublished. This book presents Eggleston's early Memphis images, his testing of color and compositional strategies, and the development towards the "poetic snapshot." Chromes shows a master in the making.
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William Eggleston: Chromes
by Thomas Weski, William Eggleston
“Chromes effortlessly traces the themes and subject matter which became Eggleston’s signature.… Ultimately, it points to the way his eye saw images in a broader scale, which led to his unrivalled knack at creating a balanced composition out of seemingly random unconnected objects.” –Wallpaper
William Eggleston’s standing as one of the masters of color photography is widely acknowledged. But the gradual steps by which he transformed from an unknown into a leading artist are less well known. Steidl has undertaken to trace these steps in an ambitious series of publications. Before Color (2010) explored Eggleston’s revelatory early black-and-white images, while Chromes is an edit of more than 5,000 Kodachromes and Ektachromes taken from 10 chronologically ordered binders found in a safe in the Eggleston Artistc Trust. This archive had once been used by John Szarkowski, who selected the 48 images printed in Eggleston’s seminal book William Eggleston’s Guide, while the rest of the archive has remained almost entirely unpublished. Featuring a newly designed slipcase, this three-volume publication presents Eggleston’s early Memphis imagery, his testing of color and compositional strategies, and the development toward the “poetic snapshot.” In short, Chromes shows a master in the making.
Born in Memphis in 1939, William Eggleston obtained his first camera in 1957 and was later profoundly influenced by Henri Cartier-Bresson’s The Decisive Moment. His exhibition Photographs by William Eggleston at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1976 was a milestone; in 2008 a retrospective of his work was held at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and at Haus der Kunst in Munich in 2009. Eggleston’s books include Los Alamos Revisited (2012), The Democratic Forest (2015), Election Eve (2017), Morals of Vision (2019), Flowers (2019), Polaroid SX-70 (2019) and The Outlands (2021).
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$350.00
William Eggleston: The Outlands
A luxurious three-volume box set of previously unseen images from the 1960s and 1970s by the father of American color photography
A New York Times Book Review 2021 holiday gift guide pick
The three volumes of The Outlands are drawn from photographs that William Eggleston (born 1939) made on color transparency film from 1969 to 1974, which formed the basis for John Szarkowski’s seminal exhibition of Eggleston’s work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1976 with the accompanying book William Eggleston’s Guide. However, with the exception of a couple of alternate versions, none of the photographs in The Outlands have been published previously.
The result is revelatory. Starting at almost the exact point on the same street in suburban Memphis where Eggleston made his famous photograph of a tricycle, the work follows a route through the back roads to old Mississippi where he was raised. What is disclosed is a sublime use of pure color hovering in semi-detachment from the forms he records. At the time, Eggleston was photographing a world that was already vanishing. Today, this final installment of his color work offers a view of a great American artist discovering the range of his visual language and an unforgettable document of the Deep South in transition.
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William Eggleston: Black and White
Black and White is an updated and expanded edition of William Eggleston’s (born 1939) Before Color (Steidl, 2012), the first publication to comprehensively present Eggleston’s early black-and-white photos and explore his artistic beginnings.
In the late 1950s Eggleston began photographing his hometown of Memphis, discovering many of the motifs that would come to define his seminal work in color: the diners, cars, gas stations, supermarkets, domestic interiors and the seemingly mundane gestures and expressions of his fellow citizens. Also here are his unconventional, sometimes tilted croppings, and above all his emphasis on the beautiful in the banal. In the mid-1960s Eggleston began working with color and after experimenting with different exposure settings he was soon pleased with the results―“And by God it all worked. Just overnight.” He subsequently abandoned black-and-white photography but its influence on his original vision of the American everyday remains fundamental.
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William Eggleston: Election Eve
"On the eve of the election, when nothing had yet been decided, when everything―whatever that everything was―hung in the balance, Eggleston made an elegy … a statement of perfect calm." ―Lloyd Fonvielle
In 1977 William Eggleston released Election Eve, his first and most elaborate artist’s book, containing 100 original prints in two leatherbound volumes, housed in a linen box. It was published by Caldecot Chubb in New York in an edition of only five, and has since become Eggleston’s rarest collectible book. This new Steidl edition recreates the full original sequence of photos in a single volume, making it available to the wider public for the first time.
Election Eve contains images made in October 1976 during Eggleston’s pilgrimage from Memphis to the small town of Plains, Georgia, the home of Jimmy Carter who in November 1976 was elected 39th President of the United States. Eggleston began photographing even before he left Memphis and depicted the surrounding countryside and villages of Sumter County, before he reached Plains. His photos of lonesome roads, train tracks, cars, gas stations and houses are mostly empty of people and form an intuitive, unsettling portrait of Plains, starkly different from the idealized image of it subsequently promoted by the media. The book includes a preface by Hollywood screenwriter (The Mummy, 1999), director (Gotham, 1988) and author Lloyd Fonvielle.
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$98.00
William Eggleston: Musik (Vinyl)
While William Eggleston (born 1939) needs little introduction as a master of color photography, few are aware of his fine ability as a pianist. Musik (Vinyl), consisting of two vinyl LPs, is only the second, and the most elaborate, publication of his musical recordings to date.
Performed in the 1980s on his Korg OW/1 FD Pro keyboard synthesizer and stored on floppy disks since, revealed here are pieces by Eggleston's favorite composers across genres―from Beethoven and Chopin to Gilbert and Sullivan, from jazz to reggae―as well as improvisations of considerable brio. Accompanied by a booklet of photos showing Eggleston while playing, Musik (Vinyl) reveals hitherto unknown facets of his creativity, and is part of Steidl's plan to publish Eggleston's complete works: his books, music and a future release of his 1974 video Stranded in Canton.
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Before Color
A few years ago a box was found in the archives of the William Eggleston Artistic Trust in Memphis, containing Eggleston's earliest photography―remarkably, in black and white. The photos were subsequently exhibited and sold at Cheim & Read gallery in New York. This book reunites these photos in their entirety, and shows the artistic beginnings of a pioneer of contemporary photography. In the late 1950s, Eggleston began photographing suburban Memphis using high-speed 35 mm black-and-white film, developing the style and motifs that would come to shape his pivotal color work, including diners, supermarkets, domestic interiors and people engaged in seemingly trivial and banal situations. Now, 50 years later, all the plates in Before Color have been scanned from vintage prints developed by Eggleston in his own darkroom. In the mid-1960s Eggleston discovered color film and was immediately satisfied with the results: "And by God, it worked. Just overnight." Eggleston then abandoned black-and-white photography, but its fundamental influence on his practice is undeniable.
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William Eggleston: From Black and White to Colour
At the end of the 1950s William Eggleston began to photograph around his home in Memphis using black-and-white 35mm film. Fascinated by the photography of Henri Cartier-Bresson, Eggleston declared at the time: "I couldn't imagine doing anything more than making a perfect fake Cartier-Bresson." Eventually Eggleston developed his own style which later shaped his seminal work in color-an original vision of the American everyday with its icons of banality: supermarkets, diners, service stations, automobiles and ghostly figures lost in space. From Black and White to Color includes some exceptional as-yet-unpublished photographs, and displays the evolution, ruptures and above all the radicalness of Eggleston's work when he began photographing in color at the end of the 1960s. Here we discover similar obsessions and recurrent themes as present in his early black-and-white work including ceilings, food, and scenes of waiting, as well as Eggleston's unconventional croppings-all definitive traits of the photographer who famously proclaimed, "I am at war with the obvious."
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William Eggleston: The Democratic Forest: Selected Works
by Alexander Nemerov, William Eggleston
Over the course of nearly six decades, William Eggleston—often referred to as the “father of color photography”—has established a singular pictorial style that deftly combines vernacular subject matter with an innate and sophisticated understanding of color, form, and composition.
Eggleston has said, “I am at war with the obvious.” His photographs transform the ordinary into distinctive, poetic images that eschew fixed meaning. Though criticized at the time, his now legendary 1976 solo exhibition, organized by the visionary curator John Szarkowski at The Museum of Modern Art, New York—the first presentation of color photography at the museum—heralded an important moment in the medium's acceptance within the art-historical canon and solidified Eggleston's position in the pantheon of the greats alongside Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Frank, and Walker Evans.
Published on the occasion of David Zwirner's New York exhibition of selections from The Democratic Forest in the fall of 2016, this new catalogue highlights over sixty exceptional images from Eggleston's epic project. His photography is “democratic” in its resistance to hierarchy where, as noted by the artist, “no particular subject is more or less important than another.”
Featuring original scholarship by Alexander Nemerov, this notable presentation of The Democratic Forest provides historical context for a monumental body of work, while offering newcomers a foothold in Eggleston's photographic practice.
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William Eggleston: The Last Dyes
by William Eggleston, Jeffrey Kastner
This momentous publication catalogues the last major group of William Eggleston’s photographs to ever be produced using the dye transfer method, the format in which he originally presented them.
"Like finding a Beatles album that no one knew existed. Everything about it is mind-bogglingly good." —The Guardian
Eggleston’s vivid photographs transform the ordinary into distinctive, poetic images that eschew fixed meaning. One of the foremost practitioners in the medium’s history, Eggleston is widely considered the father of color photography. He pioneered the use of dye-transfer printing for art photography in the 1970s. The technically advanced process—first developed by Kodak in the 1940s—allowed him to achieve the richness of tonal depth and color saturation that he had been searching for. In the early 1990s, Kodak stopped producing the dyes, paper, and film used in the process. With the necessary materials now discontinued, and the bulk of what remained being used for this exhibition, The Last Dyes marks the final presentation of new works completed in this medium.
With a foreword by William Eggleston III and Winston Eggleston, and an essay by Jeffrey Kastner, this publication will offer critical insights into Eggleston’s enduring influence at this turning point in the history of photography.
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$60.00