Harmony Korine and Juergen Teller: William Eggleston 414

Description

"We drove around for days. Miles and miles of dead barren cotton wool land, depressing countryside and abandoned towns. I asked Bill, 'Where are we going? Where the fuck are you taking us?' He replied laughing, 'I wanted to show you nothing.'"-Juergen Teller. William Eggleston 414 is Harmony Korine and Juergen Teller's visual memoir of a road trip they took ten years ago with William Eggleston and his son, Winston, from Memphis to Mississippi. Featuring photos and short introductions by Korine and Teller, this record of their spontaneous, intimate journey captures their love for each other through the shared experience of the American road, and combines images of gas stations, abandoned trucks, evangelical households, banal landscapes and hotel rooms with candid portraits. Certain photos cleverly re-visit Eggleston's own famous motifs-strings of colored electric lights, road signs, people in cars-and yet the star of the show is without doubt Eggleston himself, always impeccably groomed, whether seated at the kitchen table, holding the hand of cousin Maude Schuyler Clay, or playing the grand piano. We had no real plans. No goals. Just followed the light. We drove like this for a few days. On the last night, Eggleston played us the piano. He was wearing black leather gloves. I think there was a pistol somewhere in the room. It was beautiful. - Harmony Korine

Born in 1973 in Bolinas, California, Harmony Korine is a filmmaker, screenwriter and artist. He has written and directed cult films including Gummo (1997), Breakers (2012) and The Beach Bum (2019); and his paintings and photographs have been exhibited at institutions including the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, Kunsthalle Dusseldorf and Centre Pompidou, Paris. Korine's first novel A Crackup at the Race Riots was published in 1998. Juergen Teller, born in Erlangen, Germany, in 1964, studied at the Bayerische Staatslehranstalt fur Photographie in Munich. His work has been published in influential magazines such as Vogue, System, i-D, POP and Arena Homme+, and has been the subject of solo exhibitions including those at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, the Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain in Paris and Martin-GropiusBau in Berlin. Teller won the prestigious Citibank Photography Prize in 2003, and from 2014 to 2019 held a professorship at the Akademie der Bildenden Kunste Nurnberg. His books with Steidl include Louis XV (2005), Marc Jacobs Advertising, 1998-2009 (2009), Siegerflieger (2015), The Master IV (2019) and Handbags (2019).

This Photodocumentary on the American Road exhibits the transformative work of Harmony Korine and Juergen Teller on their journey from Memphis to Mississippi with William Eggleston and his son Winston Eggleston. William Eggleston 414 revisits many of William Eggleston's famous photographs sharing stories along the road and portraying William as a confident and well groomed man. America's heartland has breath-taking landscapes and peculiar people dotted across the countryside. Korine and Teller spontaneously combine historical motifs with the color and vibrancy of the modern landscape.--Editors "Musee" A decade ago, Juergen Teller and Harmony Korine took a road trip with famed photographer William Eggleston and his son. This book serves as a visual memoir of the trip, and an homage to Eggleston himself, whose influence can be seen in many of the clever re-creations of his own themes, and who appears as a star in scenes throughout the book.--Kate Bubacz "BuzzFeed" Ten years ago, William Eggleston, Harmony Korine, and Juergen Teller set off through the American bible belt on a road trip to see nothing. It almost sounds like a Beckettian joke. For this motley trio of pilgrims it might as well have been.--Taylor Dafoe "Artnet"