William Eggleston: Election Eve - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 3958292666 ISBN 13: 9783958292666

Publisher: Steidl, 2017

Synopsis

"On the eve of the election, when nothing had yet been decided, when everything―whatever that everything was―hung in the balance, Eggleston made an elegy … a statement of perfect calm." ―Lloyd Fonvielle

In 1977 William Eggleston released Election Eve, his first and most elaborate artist’s book, containing 100 original prints in two leatherbound volumes, housed in a linen box. It was published by Caldecot Chubb in New York in an edition of only five, and has since become Eggleston’s rarest collectible book. This new Steidl edition recreates the full original sequence of photos in a single volume, making it available to the wider public for the first time.
Election Eve contains images made in October 1976 during Eggleston’s pilgrimage from Memphis to the small town of Plains, Georgia, the home of Jimmy Carter who in November 1976 was elected 39th President of the United States. Eggleston began photographing even before he left Memphis and depicted the surrounding countryside and villages of Sumter County, before he reached Plains. His photos of lonesome roads, train tracks, cars, gas stations and houses are mostly empty of people and form an intuitive, unsettling portrait of Plains, starkly different from the idealized image of it subsequently promoted by the media. The book includes a preface by Hollywood screenwriter (The Mummy, 1999), director (Gotham, 1988) and author Lloyd Fonvielle.

About this title

About the Author

Herve Chandes is director of the Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain.

From Library Journal

Assembled by art critic Chandes, this volume was published to accompany a French exhibition of the work of American photographer William Eggleston. The photographs he produces sanctify the mundane while honoring and holding forever the inconsequential moment. This large, word-free collection contains some of his best old (1970s) and new photography. The idea that life, land, cars, small buildings, and clusters of people are assembled in bunches at random, in the accidental reality of a time and place, seen and framed and preserved by a photographer, helps all of us grasp the value of looking and trying to understand the world's visual chaos. When Eggleston photographs a '65 Buick that inexplicably ran up a concrete drainage wall only to be partially crushed and wedged under a highway overpass, we think, "That's amazing." But his expanded photo of the wreck through a wide-angle lens shows nearby bell-bottomed onlookers placed in no order with no apparent purpose but detached from the wreck by the onset of the immediate boredom common to the ordinary moment. Eggleston is the master of the moment. The only complaint here is that every one of the 146 photographs reproduced is titled Untitled. We need to know the words the photographer attaches to some of these preserved situations. Recommended.
David Bryant, New Canaan Lib., CT
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Steidl
• Publication date: 2017
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 3958292666
• ISBN 13: 9783958292666
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 216