William Eggleston

Never-before-seen black-and-white nightclub photographs enliven the typical Eggleston oeuvre

This monograph on American photographer William Eggleston highlights his photos taken on a large-format 5 x 7 camera in the early 1970s. It features both color and black-and-white photographs, the latter of which are a never-before-seen series of portraits taken inside the nightclubs that Eggleston frequented. Museum director and contemporary art curator Walter Hopps--an early champion for Eggleston--characterized these images as "offhand and spontaneous but insistently stark; their brutality is heightened by the absence of color." The volume also features Eggleston in conversation with filmmaker Michael Almereyda, who directed a documentary on the artist in 2005.

William Eggleston (born 1939) encountered photography and abstract expressionism while studying at Vanderbilt and the University of Mississippi. Inspired by the work of Robert Frank and Henri Cartier-Bresson, Eggleston began working with color film in the 1960s and is credited with popularizing its use among artistic photographers. His work can be found in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Michael Almereyda (born 1959) originally studied art history at Harvard before leaving the university to pursue filmmaking. He is best known for his 2000 adaptation of Hamlet starring Ethan Hawke and Julia Stiles. His 2005 documentary William Eggleston in the Real World was nominated for a Gotham Award.