Göttingen, Germany: Steidl (September 2021)

Three volume set in slipcase.

New.

A luxurious three-volume box set of previously unseen images from the 1960s and 1970s by the father of American color photography

The three volumes of The Outlands are drawn from photographs that William Eggleston (born 1939) made on color transparency film from 1969 to 1974, which formed the basis for John Szarkowski’s seminal exhibition of Eggleston’s work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1976 with the accompanying book William Eggleston’s Guide. However, with the exception of a couple of alternate versions, none of the photographs in The Outlands have been published previously.

The result is revelatory. Starting at almost the exact point on the same street in suburban Memphis where Eggleston made his famous photograph of a tricycle, the work follows a route through the back roads to old Mississippi where he was raised. What is disclosed is a sublime use of pure color hovering in semi-detachment from the forms he records. At the time, Eggleston was photographing a world that was already vanishing. Today, this final installment of his color work offers a view of a great American artist discovering the range of his visual language and an unforgettable document of the Deep South in transition.

Master color photographer William Eggleston was born in 1939 in Memphis, Tennessee, where he continues to live today. Considered a national treasure for his heartbreakingly soulful photographs of America & Americans, and most closely associated with images of the South. He introduced dye-transfer printing, a previously commercial photographic process, into the making of artists’ prints. A pioneer in the artistic use of color in photography his seminal exhibition in 1976 at the Museum of Modern Art resulted in the photobook classic William Eggleston’s Guide.