The Outlands - 2nd edition

STEIDL

652 pages, 405 images

Clothbound in slipcase
315 x 320 mm 
Number of items: 3

Edited by Mark Holborn, William Eggleston III and Winston Eggleston

Second Edition 2022

The publication of William Eggleston’s Chromes by Steidl in 2011 marked the beginning of the examination of the entire prolific output of this extraordinary artist in a range of books including Los Alamos Revisited (2012) and the ten-volume The Democratic Forest (2015).

The three volumes of The Outlands are drawn from the same source, the photographs Eggleston made on color transparency film from 1969 to 1974 that formed the basis for the Chromes volumes and for John Szarkowski’s seminal exhibition of Eggleston’s work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1976 with the accompanying book William Eggleston’s Guide.

However, with the exception of a couple of alternate versions, none of the photographs in The Outlands has been published previously.

The result is revelatory. Starting at almost the exact point on the same street in suburban Memphis where Eggleston famously photographed the tricycle, the work follows a route through the back roads to old Mississippi where he was raised. What is disclosed is a sublime use of pure color hovering in semi-detachment from the forms he records. At the time, Eggleston was photographing a world that was already vanishing. Today, this final installment of his color work offers a view of a great American artist discovering the range of his visual language and an unforgettable document of the Deep South in transition.

         

William Eggleston was born in 1939 in Memphis, Tennessee, where he still lives today. Since the 1970s, Eggleston’s work has been the subject of major solo exhibitions, beginning with his groundbreaking 1976 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (which subsequently traveled to several venues).

Solo exhibitions:  Corcoran Gallery of Art,Washington, DC (1990); the Barbican Gallery, London (1992; later shown at multiple venues); the Museum Ludwig, Cologne (2003; later shown at multiple venues); the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2008; later shown at multiple venues); Tate Modern, London (2013); The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2013 and 2018); the National Portrait Gallery, London (2016); and Foam Fotografiemuseum, Amsterdam (2017); & many others.