CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 7/26/2020

Back in Stock! 'William Eggleston: Election Eve'

“Bank parking lot, Plains” is reproduced from William Eggleston: Election Eve, Steidl’s superb volume gathering 100 photographs that Eggleston shot in and around Plains, Georgia (en route from Mississippi), just prior to the 1976 Presidential election, when Democrat Jimmy Carter of Georgia defeated incumbent Republican President Gerald Ford from Michigan. “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 writes. “To say, however, that these photographs are romantic, sorrowful and quiet is not to imply that they are easy or in any sense comforting. They are richer and more sensual in some ways than Eggleston’s other work, but they are not less penetrating or unsettling. In them Eggleston seems bent, as always, on recording those unremarked units of spatial perception by which the everyday world is unconsciously ordered.”