William Eggleston: Chromes

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in Eggleston’s seminal book William Eggleston’s Guide, while the rest of the archive has remained almost entirely unpublished.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.