William Eggleston

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.

Although the first universal color slide film came onto the market in 1935, it was reserved for the world of advertising, and as late as the 1980s it was still considered commercial, vulgar and unartistic. Despite this, from the 1960s onward, more and more photographers began to discover the creative possibilities of the medium. William Eggleston, whose career has spanned over five decades, not only substantially contributed to this paradigm shift; he also noticeably influenced many subsequent generations. Along with Saul Leiter, Evelyn Hofer and Stephen Shore, Eggleston was one of the first photographers to recognize the distinctive power of color and its unique capacity to create pictures that continuously challenge the everyday. He imbued banality with the uncanny and mysterious, investigating his immediate surroundings again and again—as if he were somehow suspicious of the contents of his freezer, the ketchup bottle on the diner counter, not to mention the guns that appear as if by chance in so many of his pictures. Mystery of the Ordinary captures the full scope of Eggleston’s evolution and legacy: from the early black-and-white work of the late 1950s, in which we witness his discovery and exploration of themes and unconventional croppings, to some of his most iconic color images.
Born in Memphis in 1939, William Eggleston obtained his first camera in 1957. 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 published by Steidl include Chromes (2011), 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).

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).

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.

American photographer William Eggleston approached his quotidian snapshots of Americana with a vivid and cinematic eye. For Now is a curation of Eggleston’s unpublished photographs by filmmaker Michael Almereyda, director of the 2005 documentary William Eggleston in the Real World. Almereyda pores through a collection of over 35,000 images in the archive spanning four decades of work in what he calls “the B-sides, the bootlegs, the unreleased tracks.” This oversized fourth edition includes eight additional new unpublished photographs. Essays include text by Almereyda as well as Greil Marcus, author of Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century; author and film critic Amy Taubin; Kristine McKenna, Los Angeles Times journalist from 1977 through 1998, and one of the first mainstream chroniclers of the L.A. punk rock scene; and director and screenwriter Lloyd Fonvielle. Unusual in its concentration on the artist’s family and friends, the book suggests an air of offhand intimacy, typical of Eggleston and typically surprising.
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.

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.

Flowers is a facsimile of the third of William Eggleston’s (born 1939) rare artist’s books, which was first published in an edition of only 15 by Caldecott Chubb in New York in 1978. The original Flowers was a linen-bound volume with red leather spine and corners recreating the look of a photo album, and housed in a slipcase. Within its pages were 12 original chromogenic coupler prints focused on the theme of flowers.

This book is a facsimile of an album of Eggleston's Polaroids assembled by the photographer himself, and containing the only photos he made in this medium. Consisting of 56 images taken with the Polaroid SX-70 (the now cult camera produced between 1972 and 1981) and hand-mounted in a black leather album also produced by the company, Polaroid SX-70 is the first publication of Eggleston's Polaroids.

The gloriously mundane subjects of these photos—a Mississippi street sign, a telephone book, stacked crates of empty soda bottles—is familiar Eggleston territory, but, fascinatingly, all of these Polaroids were taken outdoors. They are rare records of Eggleston's strolls or drives in and around Mississippi, complementing the majority of his work made with color negative film or color slides, and showing his flair for photo-sequencing in book form.

When William Eggleston’s (born 1939) second artist’s book Morals of Visions was first published in 1978 in a limited edition of 15, only a handful of lucky people were able to obtain it; it has since become a collectible rarity. That is now to change with this new Steidl edition, which re-imagines Morals of Visions as a trade book for the general public.

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.

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.

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.

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.