William Eggleston: Chromes

Description

"Chromes shows the best of William Eggleston's early transparencies for the first time, excluding those published in his Guide. The three volumes of Chromes form a visual register, making clear that Eggleston had grasped the concept of the 'democratic camera' early on in his career. The compilation and sequencing of pictures in Chromes were made in close collaboration with William Eggleston, and together with his sons Winston and William III." Thomas Weski This is the long-awaited reprint of William Eggleston's Chromes, the first in the ongoing series of boxed sets published by Steidl examining the entirety of Eggleston's seminal oeuvre. Eggleston's standing as one of the masters of colour photography is widely acknowledged. But the gradual steps by which he transformed from an unknown into a leading artist are less well known. Chromes is an edit of more than 5,000 Kodachromes and Ektachromes taken from ten chronologically ordered binders found in a safe at the Eggleston Artistic 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in Eggleston's seminal book William Eggleston's Guide, while the rest of the archive has remained almost entirely unpublished. This book presents Eggleston's early Memphis imagery, his testing of colour and compositional strategies, and the development towards 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).

Presents Eggleston's early experimentation with colour and composition and his mastery of the poetic snapshot.--Sara Semic "Financial Times: How To Spend It" Sometimes beauty just is. Spending time with Chromes (or any Eggleston book for that matter) will almost certainly help retrain your eye to be more open to see it.--Todd Cooper "Eugene Weekly" While hundreds of photos have been included, seldom does the viewer's excitement wane. Eggleston is that rare artist who invents the visual world anew with nearly every image.--Albert Mobilio "Hyperallergic"