William Eggleston: From Black and White to Color
Publisher: Steidl
Publication Date: 2014
Text by Thomas Weski
At the end of the 1950s William Eggleston began to photograph around his home in Memphis using black-and-white 35mm film. Fascinated by the photography of Henri Cartier-Bresson, Eggleston declared at the time: "I couldn't imagine doing anything more than making a perfect fake Cartier-Bresson. " Eventually Eggleston developed his own style which later shaped his seminal work in color—an original vision of the American everyday with its icons of banality: supermarkets, diners, service stations, automobiles, and ghostly figures lost in space. From Black and White to Color includes some exceptional as-yet-unpublished photographs, and displays the evolution, ruptures and above all the radicalness of Eggleston's work when he began photographing in color at the end of the 1960s. Here we discover similar obsessions and recurrent themes as present in his early black-and-white work including ceilings, food, and scenes of waiting, as well as Eggleston\s unconventional croppings-all definitive traits of the photographer who famously proclaimed, "I am at war with the obvious."
Details
Publisher: Steidl
Artist: William Eggleston
Publication Date: 2014
ISBN: 9783869307930
Retail: $45 | £32
Status: Not Available
Binding: Hardcover
Dimensions: 7 x 9 1/2 in (17.8 x 24.1 cm)
Pages: 192
Reproductions: illustrated throughout
Artist and Contributors
William Eggleston
Over the course of nearly six decades, William Eggleston (b. 1939) has established a singular pictorial style that deftly combines vernacular subject matter with an innate and sophisticated understanding of color, form, and composition. His photographs transform the ordinary into distinctive, poetic images that eschew fixed meaning. One of the medium’s foremost practitioners to date, Eggleston’s work continues to exert an influence on contemporary visual culture at large.
$45