William Eggleston Livres

Exposition 20 novembre 2001 - 24 février 2002, Paris Fondation

The negatives for the Los Alamos Project were created between 1965 and 1974 and archived in two boxes, Box #17 and Box #83. In the nineties, these boxes were moved from Memphis to New York, where William Eggleston, Walter Hopps, Caldecot Chubb, and Winston Eggleston edited the photographs into five portfolio boxes of dye transfer prints, with an edition of five and three sets of artist proofs. Thirteen additional images, not included in the portfolios, were printed as individual dye-transfer prints known as the “cousins” of the project. Walter Hopps initially envisioned an exhibition, but it never materialized, leading him to return Box #17 to Memphis while Box #83 was forgotten. After Hopps’ death, his widow discovered Box #83 in his office, which was then returned to the Eggleston Artistic Trust. The negatives in Box #83 had been organized by Hopps and documented in a handmade book titled Lost and Found Los Alamos. In late 2011, William Eggleston III and Marc Holborn reviewed the complete set of negatives for a final edit, culminating in 2012 with the three-volume set titled Los Alamos Revisited. The sequence was composed by Thomas Weski, who previously edited the Scalo book Los Alamos. This new edition includes the long-lost negatives from Box #83, completing the collection. William Eggleston, born in 1939 in Memphis, continues to live and work there.

Zu Beginn der Fotogeschichte war der Himmel grau und das Diktum der künstlerischen Fotografie und des Fotojournalismus lange Zeit schwarzweiß. Obwohl bereits 1935 der erste breit einsetzbare Diapositivfilm auf den Markt kam, blieb die Farbfotografie der Werbewelt vorbehalten und galt als kommerziell, vulgär und nicht-künstlerisch. Ungeachtet dessen entdeckten ab den 1960er Jahren immer mehr Fotograf: innen mit der New Color Photography andere und neue Gestaltungsmöglichkeiten. Das über fünf Jahrzehnte umfassende Werk von William Eggleston hat wesentlich zu diesem Paradigmenwechsel beigetragen. Neben Stephen Shore, Saul Leiter und Evelyn Hofer erkannte Eggleston früh die unverwechselbare Kraft der Farbe und ihre einzigartige Qualität zur Abbildung des Alltäglichen. Zumal Eggleston keineswegs vorgab, im Beiläufigen das Schöne bloßzulegen. Stattdessen überzog er das Banale mit einem Moment des Unheimlichen und Rätselhaften: Gerade weil Farbe der menschlichen Wahrnehmung so nahekommt, musste Eggleston die eigene Umgebung mittels der Fotografie immer wieder überprüfen – als seien ihm selbst die gefrorenen Lebensmittel im Eisfach nicht geheuer, nicht die Ketchup-Flaschen auf der Theke, und schon gar nicht die Waffen, die wie zufällig in so vielen seiner Bilder auftauchen.

William 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. Steidl has undertaken to trace these steps in an ambitious series of publications. Before Color (Steidl, 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 ten chronologically ordered binders found in a safe in the Eggleston Artistc Trust. This archive had once been used by John Szarkowski who selected the forty-eight 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. William Eggleston, born in Memphis in 1939, is one of the most important contemporary American photographers. From the 1970s onwards, his work has been central to the recognition of colour photography as an artistic medium. Eggleston has published extensively and has shown in many major exhibitions. Steidl has published Eggleston’s Paris (2009) and Before Color (2010).

"Los Alamos" presents a series of photos that have never before been shown, yet it contains a blueprint of Eggleston's aesthetics, his subtle use of subdued color hues, the casual elegance of his trenchant observations of the mysteries of the mundane.

For Now is the result of film-maker Michael Almereyda's year-long rummage through the Eggleston archives, a remarkable collection of heretofore unseen images spanning four decades of work by one of our seminal artists. Unusual in its concentration on family and friends, the book highlights an air of offhand intimacy, typical of Eggleston and typically surprising. Afterword by Michael Almereyda, with additional texts by Lloyd Fonvielle, Greil Marcus, Kristine McKenna and Amy Taubin.

At War with the Obvious: Photographs by William Eggleston at The Metropolitan Museum of Art presents the work of this idiosyncratic artist, whose influences are drawn from disparate if surprisingly complementary sources—from Walker Evans and Henri Cartier-Bresson in photography to Bach and late Baroque music. Many of Eggleston’s most recognized photographs are lush studies of the social and physical landscape found in the Mississippi delta region that is his home

Flowers is a facsimile of the third of William Eggleston's rare artist's books, which was first published in an edition of only fifteen 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 twelve original chromogenic coupler prints focused on the theme of flowers. Flowers, along with trees and other foliage inevitably feature in many of Eggleston's photos as part of the Memphis streetscapes and interiors that are his favorite motifs. But in this book the flowers take center stage in all their mundane glory--be it a kitsch spray of gladioli and carnations in a cut-glass vase, a single rose before a box hedge, or a forlorn bunch on a white marble tomb inscribed with the word "Mama." Along with Eggleston's Morals of Vision , also released this season, Flowers is a further chapter in Steidl's publication of Eggleston's artist's books in new editions that honor the design and spirit of the originals, while exposing their contents to the wider public for the first time.

Black and White is an updated and expanded edition of William Eggleston's Before Color (Steidl, 2012), the first publication to comprehensively present Eggleston's early black-and-white photos and explore his artistic beginnings. In the late 1950s Eggleston began photographing his hometown of Memphis, discovering many of the motifs that would come to define his seminal work in color: the diners, cars, gas stations, supermarkets, domestic interiors, and the seemingly mundane gestures and vacant expressions of his fellow citizens. Here are also his unconventional, sometimes tilted croppings, and above all his emphasis on the beautiful in the banal. In the mid-1960s Eggleston began working with color and after experimenting with different exposure settings he was soon pleased with the results--"And by God it all worked. Just overnight." He subsequently abandoned black-and-white photography but its influence on his original vision of the American everyday remains fundamental.