- Hardcover: 176 pages
- Publisher: Scalo; First Edition edition (2 Jun 2003)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 3908247691
- ISBN-13: 978-3908247692
- Product Dimensions: 32.8 x 32.3 x 3 cm
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 1,069,287 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Synopsis
"I had this notion of what I called a democratic way of looking around, that nothing was more or less important," William Eggleston once said. This radical attitude guided his ground-braking work in color photography that has prefigured many recent developments in art and photography. Los Alamos presents a series of photographs that was never shown before, yet it contains a blueprint of Eggleston's aesthetics, his subtle use of subdued hues of color, the casual elegance of his trenchant observations of the mysteries of the mundane. The photographs in Los Alamos were shot in his native Memphis and on countless road trips across the American South from 1964 to 1968 and from 1972 to 1974. Initially, Eggleston wanted to create a vast compendium of more than 2000 photographs to be contained in 20 volumes as he wanted the viewer to look at the photographs the way one looks at the world. But he abandoned the project, and hardly any of the negatives were ever printed. Now, thirty years later, we finally get to see a selection of this encyclopedia of Southern everyday life and vernacular culture.It's a stunning discovery that makes the so-called snapshot photography of recent years look pale. The astonishingly timeless portraits, still lives, landscapes, and photographs of buildings add up to a profound investigation of the world and our way of looking at it, a poetics of pleasures hidden in full-view. They transcend the merely descriptive and uncover the universal encapsulated in the details and the detritus of life in a consumer culture.
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6 reviews
18 of 19 people found the following review helpful
Insanely great photography
23 July 2003
Format:Hardcover
Eggleston is a bit of a mystery. His photographs make you open your eyes wide and say, "Wow!" but it's hard to say what it is about them that is so stunning. This book is the best thing he has published to date and it offers the clearest window into Eggleston's genius that I've seen. Reproduced on large pages in rich colors that leap out and shake you until you splutter, these pictures bypass the intellect and kick your sense of raw beauty like a mule with a belly full of habaneros.
It's clear to you that the beauty is all about the color, or is it? What's happening with the composition? Soemthing is at the tip of your tongue, but try as you might, you can't say what makes these pictures so obviously works of great genius.
When you calm back down and try to figure how a book of pictures that look almost like snapshots could sting you so hard, the accompanying essay by Thomas Weski gives the best account of Eggleston's work that I've seen to date---short, but clearer and more insightful than Janet Malcolm's meditation on color and snapshots in Diana and Nikon or Eudora Welty's introduction to The Democratic Forest.
22 of 25 people found the following review helpful
It's not about Los Alamos
21 Aug 2003
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
The photos in this book are not about Los Alamos, New Mexico. Although some of them may have been taken there, many--maybe most--are from Eggleston's familiar Deep South. One is done in an airplane flying over God-knows-where.
But the photos aren't about the locations. They are about color. And the main colors are red, white and blue.
If Eggleston's "...Guide" was photographed under the influence of the design of the Confederate flag (as Eggleston has claimed), then the framework and inspiration for this book are the colors of the American flag.
Robert Frank's monotone classic "Americans" had the underlying theme of the American flag. Eggleston's "Los Alamos" uses the colors of the flag as a motif. Shot over the years 1966 through 1974, there is a range of emotions within the photographs. There is cynicism--those were times ripe with cynicism--but there is also much found to admire in the American landscape at that time. Particularly the richness of the colors portrayed in the most banal and commonplace of subjects. In this arena, few photographic artists compare with William Eggleston.
Egglestomania
10 Aug 2008
Format:Hardcover
A very nice Eggleston Book, nice color reproductions including some of his early works. What i like most is the size of the book wich makes it an atractive photography book to buy of one of the greatest masters of colour photography.
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