Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #12183 in Books
• Published on: 2002-10-21
• Format: Facsimile
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 112 pages

Synopsis
William Eggleston's Guide was the first one-man show of colour photographs ever presented at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Museum's first publication of colour photography. The reception was divided and passionate. The book and show unabashedly forced the art world to deal with colour 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 person's Instamatic pictures from the family album. These photographs heralded a new mastery of the use of colour 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 superrefined look at the surrounding world.

Here are people, landscapes and odd little moments in and around Eggleston's home town 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 in flames, framed by a shiny silver tricycle; the curves of a gleaming black car fender, and someone's torso; a tiny, grey-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 colour separations from the original 35mm slides, producing a facsimile edition in which the colour will be freshly responsive to the photographer's intentions.

Customer Reviews

Bill's artful snapshots

William Eggleston's photos grow on you. Look through this book for the first time and the contents seem a bit like ordinary snapshots but look again and then again and with each viewing the images become more familiar (still with something fresh to discover each time) but now they start to blend together seamlessly. One reason for this, I think, is that the photos capture the everyday and the ordinary. Taken around Eggleston's hometown of Memphis and in the Deep South, they show some of his relations, street scenes, interiors, buildings and more, though the captions only state the locations. John Szarkowski says in the books introduction "..today's most radical and suggestive colour photography derives much of its vigor from commonplace models" This capturing of the everyday and in colour divided the critics in 1976 when the Museum of Modern Art used seventy-five of Egglestons's images for their first exhibition of colour photography. The 'Guide' unfortunately only shows forty-eight from the show.

Art photography until this exhibition was in black and white and had been for years, colour photos were mostly for ads, commercial print and snapshots. Thankfully the Museum's curator of photography, Szarkowski, had the good sense to allow the public to see something new and fresh. I think the 'Guide' is a good introduction to Eggleston and if you like his creative vision, as I do, have a look at these two books of his work:The Democratic Forest and Ancient & Modern. Both are full of wonderful colour photos of the American everyday.