William Eggleston: Election Eve

Description

In 1977 William Eggleston released Election Eve, his first and most elaborate artist's book, containing 100 original prints in two leather-bound 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 Country, 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 to the idealized image of it subsequently promoted by the media. The photographs have a quietude and unsentimental romanticism, as well as an edge of poignance, which belie the expectations of hopefulness or portentousness suggested by a knowledge of the time and place in which they were made. 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

William Eggleston was born in 1939 in Memphis, where he today lives. Eggleston is regarded as one of the greatest photographers of his generation and a major American artist, who has fundamentally changed how the urban landscape is viewed. He obtained his first camera in 1957 and was later profoundly influenced by Henri Cartier-Bresson's The Decisive Moment. Eggleston introduced dye-transfer printing, a previously commercial photographic process, into the making of artists' prints. His exhibition "William Eggleston's Guide" at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1976 was a milestone. He was also involved in the development of video technology in the seventies. Eggleston is represented in museums worldwide, and 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) and The Democratic Forest (2015).

With the one of the most polarising US presidential election campaigns coming to an end in just under a fortnight, the serene images taken in the run-up to another presidential election 44 years ago seem like they come from a different planet.--Jose Da Silva "Art Newspaper" [Eggleston's] images are often gorgeous, but strangely so -- he has a knack for decoupling gas pumps and mailboxes and house porches from their status as symbols and making them into simply attractive objects in themselves [...] He makes things strange so we can see things new [...] His job -- his risk -- was to scrub the meaning from the world so completely that making sense of it, bringing order to it, choosing its direction, is a task that's left to the viewer. In an election, that job was always ours anyway.--Mark Athitakis "On the Seawall" Carter remains the only Democratic candidate since 1964 to have secured victory in a majority of the southern states. Forty-four years on from its original publication -- and two months before US voters return to the polls -- the republication of Election Eve points to an America that candidates would do well not to forget.--Chris Allnut "Financial Times" In sharp contrast to the insane aggression of the current election campaign [...], Eggleston's photos of lonesome roads, train tracks, cars, gas stations and houses show an air of Southern tranquility. This new edition recreates the original sequence of photos in a single volume, making it available to the wider public for the first time-- "Coldtype" The photographs in Election Eve emit an eerie quiet--a town on the precipice of transforming from a provincial backcountry to a presidential hometown. [...] Not just a document of Plains as it stood on Election Day 1976--rather, Eggleston captured the uncertainty of its residents, the tremendous stakes. As we await the results of the current election, the stakes feel just as high, if not higher.--Jonah Goldman Kay "Paris Review" In 1977 William Eggleston released Election Eve, his first and most elaborate artist's book, containing 100 original prints in two leather-bound 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...-- "L'Oeil de la Photographie" Election Eve offers human handiwork in abundance.--Mark Feeney "Boston Globe" William Eggleston's portraits of rural Georgia on the eve of Jimmy Carter's election capture the calm before the storm.--Malcolm Jones "The Daily Beast"