WILLIAM EGGLESTON'S GUIDE
William Eggleston and John Szarkowski
John Szarkowski [essay/editor]: WILLIAM EGGLESTON'S GUIDE. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1976. First edition. Square quarto. Black leatherette-covered boards, with title stamped in gilt and a four-color plate tipped in debossed front cover, no dust jacket as issued. 112 pp. 48 color plates by William Eggleston.
Edited and essay by John Szarkowski. Designed by Carl Laanes. A near fine copy with close examination revealing trivial wear. "One of the seminal photobooks marking the beginning of another type of stream-of-consciousness photography [and] the birth of color photography, or more accurately, the moment when it was perceived as artistically respectable" [Parr & Badger]
9.25 x 9.25 innovatively designed catalog was published in conjunction with the 1976 exhibition of William Eggleston's haunting photos of everyday life in the American South held at New York's Museum of Modern Art. Curated by John Szarkowski, it was the first one-man show extended by MoMA solely to a color photographer - confirming Eggleston's well-deserved place in the pantheon of post-war photographic artists, and passing the torch on to the medium's new generation of practitioners. It is a supremely beautiful document, and a piece of twentieth century photo history as well. Featured on page 265 of Martin Parr and Gerry Badger's THE PHOTOBOOK: A HISTORY VOLUME I, pages 308-309 of The Hasselblad Center's THE OPEN BOOK, and pages 234-235 of THE BOOK OF 101 BOOKS.
John Szarkowski noted Eggleston's 'ability to monumentalize the minutiae of mundane life' and boldly declared that 'as pictures, these seem to me to be perfect.' To which New York Times art critic Hilton Kramer responded, 'Perfect? Perfectly banal, perhaps. Perfectly boring, certainly.'
"Eggleston's world would seem to be a largely private one, and yet it clearly touches us all, and has irrevocably changed the way in which we look at the world in photographs."[Parr & Badger]
"Reduced to monochrome, Eggleston's designs would be in fact almost static, almost as blandly resolved as the patterns seen in kaleidoscope, but they are perceived in color, where the wedge of purple necktie, or the red disk of the stoplight against the sky, has a different compositional torque than its equivalent panchromatic gray, as well as a different meaning. For Eggleston, who was perhaps never fully committed to photography in black and white, the lesson would be more easily and naturally learned, enabling him to make these pictures: real photographs, bits lifted from the visceral world with such tact and cunning that they seem true, seen in color from corner to corner."--from John Szarkowski's essay
"By all accounts, William Eggleston's Guide and the 1976 Museum of Modern Art exhibition it accompanied were milestones in the history of color photography. That doesn't mean either one was warmly embraced at the time but given MoMA's stature and the full-on endorsement of the museum's photo czar John Szarkowski, whose catalog essay was a model of tactful enthusiasm, Eggleston and color had to be dealt with." [Roth]
"Eggleston's pictures are at once modest and monumental, vulgar and refined, ordinary and strange, prosaic and poetic, commonplace and unforgettable" [Parr & Badger]
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