9 Must-Have William Eggleston Books

The development of post-war American photography is really hard to imagine without the contribution of William Eggleston who is often described as the Father of modern color photography. Although black-and-white photography was his initial media of choice back in the late 1950s, inspired by the work of Robert Frank and Henri Cartier-Bresson, this now acclaimed photographer soon started experimenting with color. By the mid-1960s he became a seminal figure in the field.

Despite the fact Eggleston’s development as a photographer took place aside from the other artists, he managed to establish a recognizable visual vocabulary that helped to introduce color photography as a legitimate medium. Throughout the course of his career, Eggleston has taught photography, worked with all possible formats of this media, has published numerous books, experimented with video in the 1970s worked with filmmakers such and David Byrne in the 1980s, and even released an electronic music album called Musik in 2017.

To get you acquainted with his almost six decades-long practice, we selected nine William Eggleston books that feature different aspects of his production.

Featured image: William Eggleston – The Outlands book cover. Image courtesy of Amazon.

The Outlands

Titled The Outlands, this three-volume box set features unseen images the artist has produced throughout the 1960s and 1970s which stood as the basis of the 1976 survey of William Eggleston’s work held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Starting from the cover image of a tricycle captured in suburban Memphis, this William Eggleston photo book, brings a sort of an homage to the places that were vanishing at the time, providing an important document of the American Deep South in transition.

The new reprint of Outlands came out on September 28th, 2021.

Featured image: William Eggleston – Election Eve book cover. Image courtesy of Amazon.

Election Eve

Election Eve is Eggleston’s first-ever book, originally published in 1977 by Caldecot Chubb in New York in an edition of only five. Although there is a reprint, this original leather-bound issue from 1977 has meanwhile become the photographer’s rarest collectible book.

Election Eve consists of 100 original prints made in October 1976 while Eggleston’s traveled from Memphis to the small town of Plains in Georgia, the home of Jimmy Carter who was elected 39th President of the United States just a few months earlier. The William Eggleston book includes a preface by Hollywood screenwriter, director, and author, Lloyd Fonvielle.

Featured image: William Eggleston – William Eggleston’s Guide book cover. Image courtesy of Amazon.

William Eggleston’s Guide

This particular book accompanied William Eggleston’s before-mentioned exhibition at MoMA which was the first to showcase color photographs. This event and publication forced the art world to accept color photography which was largely overlooked before that.

The Guide includes 48 images made between 1969 and 1971, featuring people, landscapes, and oddities Eggleston encountered in his hometown of Memphis. These photographs manifest a new approach to the use of color as an integral element of photographic composition.

Featured image: William Eggleston – The Democratic Forest book cover. Image courtesy of Amazon.

The Democratic Forest

The Democratic Forest is a ten-volume set with more than 1,000 photographs selected from a grand body of 12,000 photographs the artist has produced in the 1980s.

The books unravels Eggleston’s extensive travels across America from his native Memphis over Dallas, Miami, and Boston, all the way to the Berlin Wall. These works were rarely exhibited and only a part of the entire oeuvre has ever been published. These William Eggleston books feature a new introduction by Mark Holborn and Eudora Welty’s original essay on the work.

Featured image: William Eggleston – Los Alamos Revisited book cover. Image courtesy of Amazon.

Los Alamos Revisited

The book Los Alamos Revisited traces back to the project initially started by William Eggleston and Walter Hopps between 1965 and 1974. The images have been unedited for a long time until William Eggleston, Hopps, Caldecot Chubb, and Winston Eggleston developed them into a set of five portfolio boxes of dye-transfer prints.

Hopps wanted to make a grand exhibition to present the project, but plans collapsed and the idea was abandoned. The negatives were separated, and Hopps kept half of the project in Houston. Later, he returned the negatives to Memphis, however, after Hopps’ death in 2005 his widow found another box of negatives he never reported. Eventually, these were cataloged and documented in a book called Lost and Found Los Alamos.

In 2011, Eggleston’s son and Mark Holborn reviewed the entire set of negatives which is presented in its entirety in this three-volume set, including the ones which have been considered lost. The first edition of Los Alamos is now a collectors’ item.

Featured image: William Eggleston – Paris book cover. Image courtesy of Amazon.

Paris

Simply called Paris, this book brings together a selection of brilliant images made throughout different seasons during Eggleston’s three years stay in the marvelous French capital. The photographer managed to shed new light on Paris by focusing on rarely-seen facets of the city. The first print of this body of work was published for Eggleston’s exhibition at Paris’s Fondation Cartier. It also includes paintings juxtaposed with the photographs that inspired them.

Featured image: William Eggleston – Before Color book cover. Image courtesy of Amazon.

Before Color

Before Color is a book that traces the beginnings of this pioneer of color photography as it contains shoots found in the archives of the William Eggleston Artistic Trust in Memphis. Those are the photographer’s early works in black and white, many of them exhibited and sold at Cheim & Read gallery in New York.

Eggleston started photographing the suburbs of Memphis in the late 1950s by using high-speed 35mm black-and-white film. Gradually, he developed a signature style that turned him into a leading practitioner in the field.

Featured image: William Eggleston – Chromes book cover. Image courtesy of Amazon.

Chromes

The book Chromes encompasses more than 5,000 Kodachromes and Ektachromes found in a safe in the Eggleston Artistic Trust. Some of the William Eggleston photographs were used by John Szarkowski, for the seminal book William Eggleston’s Guide, while the rest of the archive remained unpublished. This book features Eggleston’s early Memphis images, his testing of color, and innovative compositional approaches.

Featured image: William Eggleston – Polaroid SX-70 book cover. Image courtesy of Amazon.

Polaroid SX-70

The last book on our list is a facsimile of an album of Eggleston’s Polaroids that contains the only William Eggleston photos made in this medium. The photographer assembled 56 images taken with the Polaroid SX-70 and hand-mounted in a black leather album. These shoots are rare records of Eggleston’s drives in and around Mississippi that stand shoulder to shoulder with other works executed with color negative film or color slides.