| William Eggelston's Guide
     
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Hardcover
MIT Press
Published 1976
About the Author
Born in 1937 in Memphis, Tennessee, William Eggleston works as a photographer in his home state and in Washington, D.C. He has been a lecturer in Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University, a researcher in color video at the Massachussetts Institute of Technology, and a recipient of grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Arts Survey. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Book Description
William Eggleston's Guide was the first one-man show of color photographs ever presented at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Museum's first publication of color photography. The reception was divided and passionate. The book and show unabashedly forced the art world to deal with color photography, a medium scarcely taken seriously at the time, and with the vernacular content of a body of photographs that could have been but definitely weren't some average American's Instamatic pictures from the family album. These photographs heralded a new mastery of the use of color as an integral element of photographic composition. Bound in a textured cover inset with a photograph of a tricycle and stamped with yearbook-style gold lettering, the Guide contained 48 images edited down from 375 shot between 1969 and 1971 and displayed a deceptively casual, actually super-refined look at the surrounding world. Here are people, landscapes, and odd little moments in and around Eggleston's hometown of Memphis--an anonymous woman in a loudly patterned dress and cat's eye glasses sitting, left leg slightly raised, on an equally loud outdoor sofa; a coal-fired barbecue shooting up flames, framed by a shiny silver tricycle, the curves of a gleaming black car fender, and someone's torso; a tiny, gray-haired lady in a faded, flowered housecoat, standing expectant, and dwarfed in the huge dark doorway of a mint-green room whose only visible furniture is a shaded lamp on an end table. For this edition of William Eggleston's Guide, The Museum of Modern Art has made new color separations from the original 35 mm slides, producing a facsimile edition in which the color will be freshly responsive to the photographer's intentions.
[These] pictures are like no one else's. At once ordinary and spectacular, they look like someone's not particularly interesting snapshots until their matter-of-fact beauty and gorgeousness kick in. --Vince Aletti
As pictures, these seem to me perfect. . .collectively a paradigm of a private view. . .described here with clarity, fullness and elegance. --John Szarkowski
Essay by John Szarkowski.
Hardcover, 9 x 9 in., 112 pages, 48 color and 1 b&w
Publisher: The Museum of Modern Art, New York --This text refers to the Hardcover edition. |
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