Delving into critical and familiar themes of William Eggleston’s work, his recently revisited body of photographs, The Outlands, goes on a journey with him through the mythic and evolving southern landscape. Vibrant colors and a profound nostalgia echo throughout Eggleston’s breathtaking oeuvre. His motifs of signage, cars, and roadside scenes create an iconography of American vistas that inspired a generation of photographers. His experimental composition peers through layered scenes—an orange sunset dips into an abandoned diner as we observe from the cracked parking lot—expanding the boundaries of interior and exterior. These idiosyncratic moments are emblematic of Eggleston’s curated yet innovative practice.

Eggleston has said, "I am at war with the obvious." His photographs transform the ordinary into distinctive, poetic images that eschew fixed meaning. Though criticized at the time, his now legendary 1976 solo exhibition William Eggleston's Guide, organized by the visionary curator John Szarkowski at The Museum of Modern Art, New York--the first presentation of color photography at the museum--heralded an important moment in the medium's acceptance within the art-historical canon and solidified Eggleston's position in the pantheon of the greats alongside Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Frank, and Walker Evans. Published on the occasion of David Zwirner's New York exhibition of selections from The Democratic Forest, this new book highlights sixty exceptional images from Eggleston's epic project. His photography is "democratic" in its resistance to hierarchy where, as noted by the artist, "no particular subject is more or less important than another." Featuring original scholarship by renowned art historian, Alexander Nemerov, this notable presentation of The Democratic Forest provides historical context for a monumental body of work, while offering newcomers a foothold in Eggleston's photographic practice.

"Following the publication of Chromes in 2011 and Los Alamos Revisited in 2012, the reassessment of Eggleston's career continues with the publication of The Democratic Forest, his most ambitious project. This ten-volume set containing more than a thousand photographs is drawn from a body of twelve thousand pictures made by Eggleston in the 1980s. Following an opening volume of work in Louisiana, which serves as a visual preface, the remaining books cover Eggleston's travels from his familiar ground in Memphis and Tennessee to Dallas, Pittsburgh, Miami, Boston, the pastures of Kentucky, and as far as the Berlin Wall. The final volume leads the viewer back to the South of small towns, cotton fields, the Civil War battlefield of Shiloh and the home of Andrew Jackson, the President from Tennessee. The democracy of Eggleston's title refers to his democracy of vision, through which he represents the most mundane subjects with the same complexity and significance as the most elevated. The exhaustive editing process of The Democratic Forest--a rarely shown body of work of which only a fraction has been published to date--has taken over three years, and was guided by the belief that only on this large scale can the magnitude of Eggleston's achievement be represented. With no precedent in American art, Eggleston's photography seen as a whole has all the grandeur of an epic piece of fiction.--Publisher's Web site.

Born and raised in Mississippi and Tennessee, William Eggleston began taking pictures during the 1960s after seeing Henri Cartier-Bresson's The Decisive Moment. In 1966 he changed from black and white to color film, perhaps to make the medium more his own and less that of his esteemed predecessors. John Sarkowski, when he was curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, called Eggleston the "first color photographer, " and certainly the world in which we consider a color photograph as art has changed because of Eggleston. From 1966 to 1971, Eggleston would occasionally use a two and one quarter inch format for photographs. These are collected and published here for the first time, adding more classic Eggleston images to photography's color canon.

When William Eggleston's second artist's book Morals of Visions was first published in 1978 in a limited edition of fifteen, only a handful of lucky people were able to obtain it; it has since become a collectible rarity. That is now to change with this new Steidl edition, which re-imagines Morals of Visions as a trade book for the general public. The original Morals of Vision contains eight color coupler prints of Eggleston's archetypal still lifes, landscapes and portraits which glorify the banal and have since changed the history of color photography. "There is no particular reason to search for meaning," Eggleston has said of his work in general, a sentiment in contrast with the title Morals of Vision which suggests that there are indeed principles of a kind to be learnt from the images in this book. Yet the lessons in photos including those of a broom leaning again a wall, green grain silos in the fading light, and an off-center electric candle complete with fake wax, remain Eggleston's own ironic secret. 'I don't have a burning desire to go out and document anything. It just happens when it happens. It's not a conscious effort, nor is it a struggle.' -William Eggleston

Contributions by Megan Abbott, Michael Almereyda, Kris Belden-Adams, Maude Schuyler Clay, William Dunlap, W. Ralph Eubanks, William Ferris, Marti A. Funke, Lisa Howorth, Amanda Malloy, Richard McCabe, Emily Ballew Neff, Robert Saarnio, and Anne Wilkes Tucker The Beautiful Mysterious: The Extraordinary Gaze of William Eggleston is an examination of the life and work of the artist widely considered to be the father of color photography. William Eggleston was born in 1939 and grew up in the Mississippi Delta town of Sumner. His innovative 1976 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York helped establish color photography as an artistic medium and has inspired photographers and artists around the world. Edited by Ann J. Abadie, the catalog contains fifty-five Eggleston photographs, thirty-six that were featured in The Beautiful Mysterious exhibition at the University of Mississippi Museum from September 2016 to February 2017. Eggleston’s longtime friend William Ferris, a celebrated folklorist, donated all the photographs to the Museum. The photographs range from 1962 into the 1980s, representing each of Eggleston’s projects during that time. Some of the photographs are inscribed with Eggleston’s rare handwritten notes about location, people, dates, and projects. Eight of Eggleston’s early dye transfers are in the collection. Many of these works had not been on public display before this exhibition, including black-and-white images that are unique-copy single prints. This is a penetrating examination of the influence of the Mississippi Delta and the American South on Eggleston’s work and of Eggleston’s influence on photography and other creative fields.

In April 1979, a book of fifteen colour photographs by William Eggleston was published in a limited edition of twenty. The photographs were taken from the second chapter of an unpublished larger work entitled Wedgewood Blue. Amidst his publications Chromes (2011), Los Alamos Revisited (2012), and the upcoming Democratic Forest (2014) and Election Eve (2016), all documenting his lifetime work, At Zenith constitutes a calm and experimental intermezzo from Egglestons familiar loudness and intensity of colours. The photographer pointed his camera at the sky to focus on the clouds rolling by.

For Now is the result of film-maker Michael Almereyda's year-long rummage through the Eggleston archives, a remarkable collection of heretofore unseen images spanning four decades of work by one of our seminal artists. Unusual in its concentration on family and friends, the book highlights an air of offhand intimacy, typical of Eggleston and typically surprising. Afterword by Michael Almereyda, with additional texts by Lloyd Fonvielle, Greil Marcus, Kristine McKenna and Amy Taubin.

Flowers is a facsimile of the third of William Eggleston's rare artist's books, which was first published in an edition of only fifteen by Caldecott Chubb in New York in 1978. The original Flowers was a linen-bound volume with red leather spine and corners recreating the look of a photo album, and housed in a slipcase. Within its pages were twelve original chromogenic coupler prints focused on the theme of flowers. Flowers, along with trees and other foliage inevitably feature in many of Eggleston's photos as part of the Memphis streetscapes and interiors that are his favorite motifs. But in this book the flowers take center stage in all their mundane glory--be it a kitsch spray of gladioli and carnations in a cut-glass vase, a single rose before a box hedge, or a forlorn bunch on a white marble tomb inscribed with the word "Mama." Along with Eggleston's Morals of Vision , also released this season, Flowers is a further chapter in Steidl's publication of Eggleston's artist's books in new editions that honor the design and spirit of the originals, while exposing their contents to the wider public for the first time.