William Eggleston - Los Alamos - 2004

William Eggleston: Los Alamos
2004 Scalo

Large format, hardcover with dust jacket, exceptional print quality!

The American photographer William Eggleston (born 1939) emerged in the early 1960s as a pioneer of modern color photography. Now, 50 years later, he is widely considered its greatest exemplar.

Los Alamos includes the artist’s first color photograph—Untitled, Memphis, 1965—a study of a young clerk pushing a train of shopping carts at a supermarket in Memphis, Tennessee. The image takes full advantage of the chromatic intensity of the dye-transfer color process that, until Eggleston appropriated it in the 1960s, had been used primarily by commercial photographers for advertising and product photography.

The work includes lush color studies of the social and physical landscape of the Mississippi delta region, which remains the artist’s home, as well as studies made during numerous road trips with his friends Walter Hopps and Dennis Hopper—to New Orleans, New Mexico, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and elsewhere. On these journeys, the artist explored the awesome and, at times, raw visual poetics of the American vernacular.

Los Alamos is the work of an idiosyncratic artist whose influences are drawn from disparate but surprisingly complementary sources—from Walker Evans and Henri Cartier-Bresson in photography to Bach and the late Baroque in music. As much as Eggleston was influenced by various sources, he, too, has proved influential. His inventive photographs of commonplace subjects now serve as touchstones for generations of artists, musicians, and filmmakers— from Nan Goldin to David Byrne, the Coen brothers, and David Lynch.