Black and White

Eggleston, William
William Eggleston was born in 1939 in Memphis, where he today lives. Eggleston is regarded as one of the greatest photographers of his generation and a major American artist, who has fundamentally changed how the urban landscape is viewed. He obtained his first camera in 1957 and was later profoundly influenced by Henri Cartier-Bresson's The Decisive Moment. Eggleston introduced dye-transfer printing, a previously commercial photographic process, into the making of artists' prints. His exhibition "William Eggleston's Guide" at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1976 was a milestone. He was also involved in the development of video technology in the seventies. Eggleston is represented in museums worldwide, and in 2008 a retrospective of his work was held at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and at Haus der Kunst in Munich in 2009. Eggleston's books published by Steidl include Chromes (2011), Los Alamos Revisited (2012) and The Democratic Forest (2015).

Black and White is an updated and expanded edition of William Eggleston's Before Color (Steidl, 2012), the first publication to comprehensively present Eggleston's early black-and-white photos and explore his artistic beginnings.

In the late 1950s Eggleston began photographing his hometown of Memphis, discovering many of the motifs that would come to define his seminal work in color: the diners, cars, gas stations, supermarkets, domestic interiors, and the seemingly mundane gestures and vacant expressions of his fellow citizens. Here are also his unconventional, sometimes tilted croppings, and above all his emphasis on the beautiful in the banal. In the mid-1960s Eggleston began working with color and after experimenting with different exposure settings he was soon pleased with the results-"And by God it all worked. Just overnight." He subsequently abandoned black-and-white photography but its influence on his original vision of the American everyday remains fundamental.