William Eggleston: Election Eve

The Daily Beast

Malcolm Jones

William Eggleston's portraits of rural Georgia on the eve of Jimmy Carter's election capture the calm before the storm.

Boston Globe

Mark Feeney

Election Eve offers human handiwork in abundance.

L'Oeil de la Photographie

In 1977 William Eggleston released Election Eve, his first and most elaborate artist’s book, containing 100 original prints in two leather-bound 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...

Financial Times

Chris Allnut

Carter remains the only Democratic candidate since 1964 to have secured victory in a majority of the southern states. Forty-four years on from its original publication — and two months before US voters return to the polls — the republication of Election Eve points to an America that candidates would do well not to forget.

On the Seawall

Mark Athitakis

[Eggleston's] images are often gorgeous, but strangely so — he has a knack for decoupling gas pumps and mailboxes and house porches from their status as symbols and making them into simply attractive objects in themselves [...] He makes things strange so we can see things new [...] His job — his risk — was to scrub the meaning from the world so completely that making sense of it, bringing order to it, choosing its direction, is a task that’s left to the viewer. In an election, that job was always ours anyway.

Art Newspaper

Jose Da Silva

With the one of the most polarising US presidential election campaigns coming to an end in just under a fortnight, the serene images taken in the run-up to another presidential election 44 years ago seem like they come from a different planet.

Art Newspaper

Jose da Silva

With the one of the most polarising US presidential election campaigns coming to an end in just under a fortnight, the serene images taken in the run-up to another presidential election 44 years ago seem like they come from a different planet.

Coldtype

In sharp contrast to the insane aggression of the current election campaign [...], Eggleston’s photos of lonesome roads, train tracks, cars, gas stations and houses show an air of Southern tranquility. This new edition recreates the original sequence of photos in a single volume, making it available to the wider public for the first time

Paris Review

Jonah Goldman Kay

The photographs in Election Eve emit an eerie quiet—a town on the precipice of transforming from a provincial backcountry to a presidential hometown. [...] Not just a document of Plains as it stood on Election Day 1976—rather, Eggleston captured the uncertainty of its residents, the tremendous stakes. As we await the results of the current election, the stakes feel just as high, if not higher.