William Eggleston

Los Alamos

Election Eve

Dave Hickey

A few years ago in the archives of the William Eggleston Artistic Trust in Memphis, a box was found containing Egglestons earliest photography remarkably in black and white. The photos were subsequently exhibited at Cheim & Read gallery in New York and sold. 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 colour work including diners, supermarkets, domestic interiors and people engaged in seemingly trivial and banal situations. Now, fifty 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 colour film and was quickly 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. William Eggleston, born in 1939 in Memphis, is one of the most important contemporary American photographers. From the 1970s onwards, his work has significantly contributed to the recognition of colour photography as an artistic medium. Eggleston has published his work extensively, and it has been shown in many major exhibitions around the world. He continues to live and work in Memphis, and travels considerably for photographic projects.

Before Color

William Eggleston Ancient and Modern

Chromes

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 handmounted in a black leather album also produced by the company, Polaroid SX-70 is the fi rst 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--are 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, complement the majority of his work made with color negative fi lm or color slides, and show his ironic fl air for photo-sequencing in book form. Something new always slowly changes right in front of your eyes--it just happens. -- William Eggleston

William Eggleston: Polaroid SX-70

Ancient and Modern

Artist File

Born and raised in Mississippi and Tennessee, William Eggleston began taking pictures during the 1960's after seeing Henri Cartier-Bresson's The Decisive Moment. In 1966 he changed from black and white to color film, perhaps to make the medium more his own and less that of his esteemed predecessors. John Sarkowski, when he was curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, called Eggleston the "first color photographer", and certainly the world in which we consider a color photograph as art has changed because of Eggleston. From 1966 to 1971, Eggleston would occasionally use a two and one quarter inch format for photographs. These are collected and published here for the first time, adding more classic Eggleston images to photography's color canon.

William Eggleston, 2 1/4

In response to an invitation from the Fondation Cartier, William Eggleston has spent three years working on a major photography project on Paris. This series of photographs shows the city's many facets: picturesque and cosmopolitan, sublime and vulgar, humdrum and extraordinary.

Ausstellung u.d.T.: William Eggleston : Paris

Hayward Gallery

South Bank Centre

Victoria and Albert Museum

Mark Haworth-Booth

Colour Photographs from the American South

William Eggleston is synonymous with color photography--or so we think. But the man who almost single-handedly established color photography in the art world with his 1976 Museum of Modern Art exhibition, "William Eggleston's Guide, started out as a black-and-white photographer. It was in the early 1960s that Eggleston first took to the camera, after discovering the work of Walker Evans and Henri Cartier-Bresson, and it was their black-and-white aesthetic that opened his lens. "Precolor presents Eggleston's never-before published black-and-white work, a roadmap for his later hyper-saturated color oeuvre. Eggleston's passion for everyday life, for the uncanny beauty of the mundane, is already evident in his black-and-white photographs. Whether it's a stack of metal chairs, a man at a pay phone, a child perched on a tree, or a teenager on a street corner--Eggleston captures them all with an off-hand elegance, casually endowing the most seemingly insignificant glimpses of life with substance and urgency.

The Black and White Pictures

In response to an invitation from the Fondation Cartier, William Eggleston has spent three years working on a major photography project on Paris. This series of photographs shows the citys many facets: picturesque and cosmopolitan, sublime and vulgar, humdrum and extraordinary. Harking back to a long tradition in which grand masters of photography such as Eugène Atget and Henri Cartier-Bresson chose this city as their subject, Eggleston engages in a dialogue with his predecessors via the unique photographic style for which he is well known. Published on the occasion of his exhibition at the Fondation Cartier, the publication takes the form of a workbook and places his photographs next to the drawings inspired by them. Presented to the public for the first time, these pieces offer a unique insight into the creative process behind Egglestons work.

William Eggelston has a unique ability to find beauty and striking displays of color in ordinary scenes. His idea of the democratic camera posits that by looking patiently at what others ignore, or turn away from, interesting things can be seen. Like his previous works on Plains. Georgia and Los Alamos, New Mexico, Spirit of Dunkerque contains quiet, haunting photos of the industrial port city of Dunkerque, France, each masterfully composed and bursting with unexpected color. Pictures of the ports cargo tanks and ships are blended with intermittent reminders of the natural world surrounding the industrial center, each simultaneously static and dynamic. Egglestons was the first solo exhibition of color photography at the Museum of Modern Art. He is known for his association with the Warhol crowd in the seventies and for his starkly beautiful camera work.

Spirit of Dunkerque

John Szarkowski

William Eggleston's Guide was the first one-man show of color photographs ever presented at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Museum's first publication of color photography. The reception was divided and passionate. The book and show unabashedly forced the art world to deal with color photography, a medium scarcely taken seriously at the time, and with the vernacular content of a body of photographs that could have been but definitely weren't some average American's Instamatic pictures from the family album. These photographs heralded a new mastery of the use of color as an integral element of photographic composition. Bound in a textured cover inset with a photograph of a tricycle and stamped with yearbook-style gold lettering, the Guide contained 48 images edited down from 375 shot between 1969 and 1971 and displayed a deceptively casual, actually super-refined look at the surrounding world. Here are people, landscapes, and odd little moments in and around Eggleston's hometown of Memphis--an anonymous woman in a loudly patterned dress and cat's eye glasses sitting, left leg slightly raised, on an equally loud outdoor sofa; a coal-fired barbecue shooting up flames, framed by a shiny silver tricycle, the curves of a gleaming black car fender, and someone's torso; a tiny, gray-haired lady in a faded, flowered housecoat, standing expectant, and dwarfed in the huge dark doorway of a mint-green room whose only visible furniture is a shaded lamp on an end table. For this edition of William Eggleston's Guide, The Museum of Modern Art has made new color separations from the original 35 mm slides, producing a facsimile edition in which the color will be freshly responsive to the photographer's intentions.

William Eggleston's Guide

Museum of Modern Art (New York, N.Y.)

William Eggleston's Guide was the first one-man show of colour photographs ever presented at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Museum's first publication of colour photography. The reception was divided and passionate. The book and show unabashedly forced the art world to deal with colour photography, a medium scarcely taken seriously at the time, and with the vernacular content of a body of photographs that could have been but definitely weren't some average person's Instamatic pictures from the family album. These photographs heralded a new mastery of the use of colour as an integral element of photographic composition. Bound in a textured cover inset with a photograph of a tricycle and stamped with yearbook-style gold lettering, the Guide contained 48 images edited down from 375 shot between 1969 and 1971 and displayed a deceptively casual, actually superrefined look at the surrounding world. Here are people, landscapes and odd little moments in and around Eggleston's home town of Memphis - an anonymous woman in a loudly patterned dress and cat's eye glasses sitting, left leg slightly raised, on an equally loud outdoor sofa; a coal-fired barbecue shooting up in flames, framed by a shiny silver tricycle; the curves of a gleaming black car fender, and someone's torso; a tiny, grey-haired lady in a faded, flowered housecoat, standing expectant, and dwarfed in the huge dark doorway of a mint-green room whose only visible furniture is a shaded lamp on an end table.

I am at war with the obvious. William Eggleston At the beginning of photography, the sky was invariably grey, and both art photography and photojournalism were long dominated by black and white. Although the first universal colour 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 more and more photographers began to discover the new 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 colour and its unique capacity to create pictures that continuously challenge the everyday. He imbued banality with the uncanny and mysterious: particularly because colour is integral to human perception, Eggleston investigated 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 cropping's, to some of his most iconic colour images.

William Eggleston: Mystery of the Ordinary

William Eggleston's latest monograph features photographs taken during the early 1970s using a large format 5 X 7 camera. While the book includes imagery typical of the Eggleston oeuvre-streetscapes, parked automobiles, portraits of the strange and disenfranchised-the book also offers never-before-published photographs taken in the nightclubs Eggleston used to frequent.

Five by Seven

Delving into critical and familiar themes of William Eggleston’s work, his recently revisited body of photographs, The Outlands, goes on a journey with him through the mythic and evolving southern landscape. Vibrant colors and a profound 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. His experimental composition peers through layered scenes—an orange sunset dips into an abandoned diner as we observe from the cracked parking lot—expanding the boundaries of interior and exterior. These idiosyncratic moments are emblematic of Eggleston’s curated yet innovative practice.

William Eggleston

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