William Eggleston's Guide
New York: MIT Press for the Museum of Modern Art, 1976. 4to. 110 pp. 48 color photographs and one black-and-white portrait of Eggleston. Original black bonded leather with gilt-stamped spine and cover onlay. A fine copy. Item #403899
ISBN: 9780870703171
FIRST EDITION (no date on the title-page; copyright page dated only 1976). Issued as the companion to Eggleston’s seminal 1976 exhibition at MoMA, a landmark in the history of photography.
“I once heard William Eggleston say that the nominal subjects of his pictures were no more than a pretext for the making of color photographs–the Degas position. I did not believe him, although I can believe that it might be an advantage to think so, or to pretend to think so. To me it seems that the pictures reproduced here are about the photographer’s home, about his place, in both important meanings of that word. One might say about his identity” (John Szarkowski, pp. 5-6).
“As pictures ... these seem to me perfect: irreducible surrogates for the experience they pretend to record, visual analogues for the quality of one life, collectively a paradigm of a private view, a view one would have thought ineffable, described here with clarity, fulness, and elegance” (ibid., p. 14). Auer 598; Open Book 308-309; Parr and Badger I:265; Roth 238-239. .
Price: $450.00