William Eggleston: Chromes

“Chromes shows the best of William Eggleston’s early transparencies for the first time, excluding those published in his Guide. The three volumes of Chromes form a visual register, making clear that Eggleston had grasped the concept of the ‘democratic camera’ early on in his career. The compilation and sequencing of pictures in Chromes were made in close collaboration with William Eggleston, and together with his sons Winston and William III.” Thomas Weski

This is the long-awaited reprint of William Eggleston’s Chromes, the first in the ongoing series of boxed sets published by Steidl examining the entirety of Eggleston’s seminal œuvre. Eggleston’s standing as one of the masters of colour photography is widely acknowledged. But the gradual steps by which he transformed from an unknown into a leading artist are less well known. Chromes is an edit of more than 5,000 Kodachromes and Ektachromes taken from ten chronologically ordered binders found in a safe at the Eggleston Artistic 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in Eggleston’s seminal book William Eggleston’s Guide, while the rest of the archive has remained almost entirely unpublished. This book presents Eggleston’s early Memphis imagery, his testing of colour and compositional strategies, and the development towards the “poetic snapshot.” In short, Chromes shows a master in the making.