Author Archive
William Eggleston: For Now
November 16, 2010 | by Michael Almereyda
William Eggleston, 1970. Photographer unknown.
William Eggleston’s color photographs are among the most widely viewed, and widely admired, in the medium. But I wanted to survey Eggleston’s unseen, unpublished work—his B-sides, bootlegs, unreleased tracks—and to that end I made five trips to Memphis in the course of a year, rummaging through roughly 35,000 digital scans archived by the Eggleston Artistic Trust. The intention was to come up with a book of images rescued from near oblivion. The resulting selection—necessarily partial, narrow, subjective—favors pictures of people, many of them the photographer’s blood relatives and close friends, a few of which appear below. When I reviewed an early layout with Bill, he was pleased to be confronted with images he’d clean forgotten about, and he provided considered commentary.
