William Eggleston. Chromes

“Chromes effortlessly traces the themes and subject matter which became Eggleston's signature.… Ultimately, it points to the way his eye saw images in a broader scale, which led to his unrivalled knack at creating a balanced composition out of seemingly random unconnected objects.” –Wallpaper

William Eggleston's standing as one of the masters of color 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 (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 10 chronologically ordered binders found in a safe in the Eggleston Artistc 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in Eggleston's seminal book William Eggleston's Guide, while the rest of the archive has remained almost entirely unpublished. Featuring a newly designed slipcase, this three-volume publication presents Eggleston's early Memphis imagery, his testing of color and compositional strategies, and the development toward 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).