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William Eggleston: The Outlands: Selected Works
A selection of nearly one hundred previously unseen images from the 1960s and 1970s by the pioneer of color photography, William Eggleston.
The Outlands , a series of photographs taken by Eggleston between 1969 and 1974, establishes the groundbreaking visual themes and lexicon that the artist would continue to develop for decades to come. The work offers a journey through the mythic and evolving American South, seen through the artist’s vibrant colors and a profound sense of 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. With its in-depth selection of unforgettable images—a wood-paneled station wagon, doors flung open, parked in an expansive rural setting; the artist’s grandmother in the moody interior of their family’s Sumner, Mississippi home— The Outland s is emblematic of Eggleston’s dynamic, experimental practice. The breadth of work reenergizes his iconic landscapes and forms a new perspective of the American South in transition.
Accompanying the ninety brilliant Kodachrome images and details, a literary, fictional text by the critically acclaimed author Rachel Kushner imagines a story of hitchhikers trekking through the Deep South. New scholarship by Robert Slifkin reframes the art-historical significance of Eggleston’s oeuvre, proposing affinities with work by Marcel Duchamp, Dan Graham, Jasper Johns, and Robert Smithson. A foreword by William Eggleston III offers important insights into the process of selecting and sequencing this series of images.
The Outlands , a series of photographs taken by Eggleston between 1969 and 1974, establishes the groundbreaking visual themes and lexicon that the artist would continue to develop for decades to come. The work offers a journey through the mythic and evolving American South, seen through the artist’s vibrant colors and a profound sense of 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. With its in-depth selection of unforgettable images—a wood-paneled station wagon, doors flung open, parked in an expansive rural setting; the artist’s grandmother in the moody interior of their family’s Sumner, Mississippi home— The Outland s is emblematic of Eggleston’s dynamic, experimental practice. The breadth of work reenergizes his iconic landscapes and forms a new perspective of the American South in transition.
Accompanying the ninety brilliant Kodachrome images and details, a literary, fictional text by the critically acclaimed author Rachel Kushner imagines a story of hitchhikers trekking through the Deep South. New scholarship by Robert Slifkin reframes the art-historical significance of Eggleston’s oeuvre, proposing affinities with work by Marcel Duchamp, Dan Graham, Jasper Johns, and Robert Smithson. A foreword by William Eggleston III offers important insights into the process of selecting and sequencing this series of images.
- GenresPhotographyArt
224 pages, Paperback
Published December 6, 2022
About the author
William Eggleston
56 books62 followersBorn in Memphis and raised in Sumner, Mississippi, William Eggleston was, even in youth, more interested in art and observing the world around him than in the more popular southern boyhood pursuits of hunting and sports. While he dabbled in obtaining an education at a succession of colleges including Vanderbilt and Ole Miss, he became interested in the work of Robert Frank and Henri Cartier-Bresson, and began taking black and white photographs with the Leica camera a friend had given him. He began experimenting with color photography in 1965. Although processes for color photography had existed in various forms since the turn of the century, at that time it still was not considered a medium for fine art, and was mostly relegated to the world of advertising.
Eggleston was the first photographer to have a solo show of color prints at the MoMA in 1976. Accompanied by the release of the book William Eggleston's Guide, it was a watershed moment in the history of photography.
Eggleston was the first photographer to have a solo show of color prints at the MoMA in 1976. Accompanied by the release of the book William Eggleston's Guide, it was a watershed moment in the history of photography.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
April 6, 2023
Five stars for the photographs. Stunningly great work and some unexpected moves you don't normally see in Eggleston's work. Docked a notch for the awkward design -- the *enormous* size of the book makes no sense for the proportion of the images, the photos often run across two pages and key details are lost in the gutter, weird details are blown-up and presented on their own.
October 11, 2021
This is probably the Eggleston output of most interest to those of us who enjoy vernacular architecture and decay in the late 20th c. built environment, which is amusing considering it comprises rejects and miscellaneous overspill from his more popular works.
July 31, 2026
oh, this. &, photography, forever.
The works presented in these pages have, mostly, never been seen publicly; it's taken them some fifty years to emerge from the archive. My sense is that, once my father found his language, his primary impulse was to go out and make work. Tuning in to the visual vibrations of his exposures is an entirely different process—a slower one, in which selection and juxtaposition can serve both photographer and viewer. Over the years, many eyes have passed over these images. When looking through Dad's binders-filled with thousands of his exposures—it's often the case that certain works' essential qualities come to the fore only once an editorial order is applied.
[…]
If he was "at war with the obvious" while taking pictures, I've been methodically "at war with" bias—with any past preconceptions of what a "good" Eggleston image is. (16)
*
Dad's words "I am at war with the obvious" are also stripped of any sentimentality. They suggest no yearning for a place or time. His images are observations of the South in line with William Faulkner's fiction. Faulkner headed home from Paris not to immortalize the South but to write about what he knew, to find a touchstone for something universal, something transcendent. He often acknowledged that "ineradicable curse" on the land, slavery. He was also haunted by the vanishing wilderness. Its absence threatened what he saw as an initiation, a path for boys into manhood. His story "The Bear" (1942), set in the annual hunting camps of northern Mississippi, ends with a character who has lost his mind, trying to load a gun while chasing squirrels around a single remaining tree. (18)
*
It is widely known that Henri Cartier-Bresson's The Decisive Moment shaped Dad's style of shooting, but it was Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest that informed his use of color. "That film was the first time I really saw color used," he has claimed. To reach the heart of this volume, to come full circle, is to open the color throt-tle, and to do so holistically. There are intricate parts that serve a totality. You are viewing a body of work that started in the Guide, and you can follow its broad evolution. "The Red Ceiling" (Untitled,
1973), one of Dad's most powerful works, was notably excluded from the 1976 MoMA show. Many supersaturated flavors were omitted, for good reason: the intensification of the color may have felt like a shortcut, and Dad's language had to stand on its own, unmanipulated by color itself. (18)
*
[…] he described the American South as "unrecognizable today from what it was" when he took these photographs." Aligning the immanence of color photography with the imminence of an increasingly regulated future, Eggleston's pictures convey a sense of cautious apprehension toward a present in formation, (98)
*
"The point is not her," the photographer said, as if reading George's mind. "The point is these stations of depth in the signs behind her, one, two, three: from Esso to Old Crow to Bourbon Supreme. Get it? And then the car, a detail, a part of something whole and unseen."
In the foreground was a blue wedge of a trunk lid. George knew from the elongated chromed taillight, the way the housing of the light was part of the tailfin, that the car was a Cadillac, probably an Eldorado. There was no need to point this out. He and this man, his passenger, were of the same generation. They were men from a world furnished with the same stuff—cars and attitudes and Old Crow. Long-suffering women.
The woman in the image was the man's wife, George assumed. Just from how the picture was composed and the way he'd said "her" The point is not her. (214)
*
"A king alone, without distractions, is a man of misery."
"So it's fine to be alone," George said, summarizing what he took from this aphorism. "So long as you have your distractions."
The man said that sounded about right. (215)
*
He was suddenly envious of that cashier, who wasn't looking for someone. Who was just doing her job, without having to manage a feeling of loss or doubt. (220)
The works presented in these pages have, mostly, never been seen publicly; it's taken them some fifty years to emerge from the archive. My sense is that, once my father found his language, his primary impulse was to go out and make work. Tuning in to the visual vibrations of his exposures is an entirely different process—a slower one, in which selection and juxtaposition can serve both photographer and viewer. Over the years, many eyes have passed over these images. When looking through Dad's binders-filled with thousands of his exposures—it's often the case that certain works' essential qualities come to the fore only once an editorial order is applied.
[…]
If he was "at war with the obvious" while taking pictures, I've been methodically "at war with" bias—with any past preconceptions of what a "good" Eggleston image is. (16)
*
Dad's words "I am at war with the obvious" are also stripped of any sentimentality. They suggest no yearning for a place or time. His images are observations of the South in line with William Faulkner's fiction. Faulkner headed home from Paris not to immortalize the South but to write about what he knew, to find a touchstone for something universal, something transcendent. He often acknowledged that "ineradicable curse" on the land, slavery. He was also haunted by the vanishing wilderness. Its absence threatened what he saw as an initiation, a path for boys into manhood. His story "The Bear" (1942), set in the annual hunting camps of northern Mississippi, ends with a character who has lost his mind, trying to load a gun while chasing squirrels around a single remaining tree. (18)
*
It is widely known that Henri Cartier-Bresson's The Decisive Moment shaped Dad's style of shooting, but it was Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest that informed his use of color. "That film was the first time I really saw color used," he has claimed. To reach the heart of this volume, to come full circle, is to open the color throt-tle, and to do so holistically. There are intricate parts that serve a totality. You are viewing a body of work that started in the Guide, and you can follow its broad evolution. "The Red Ceiling" (Untitled,
1973), one of Dad's most powerful works, was notably excluded from the 1976 MoMA show. Many supersaturated flavors were omitted, for good reason: the intensification of the color may have felt like a shortcut, and Dad's language had to stand on its own, unmanipulated by color itself. (18)
*
[…] he described the American South as "unrecognizable today from what it was" when he took these photographs." Aligning the immanence of color photography with the imminence of an increasingly regulated future, Eggleston's pictures convey a sense of cautious apprehension toward a present in formation, (98)
*
"The point is not her," the photographer said, as if reading George's mind. "The point is these stations of depth in the signs behind her, one, two, three: from Esso to Old Crow to Bourbon Supreme. Get it? And then the car, a detail, a part of something whole and unseen."
In the foreground was a blue wedge of a trunk lid. George knew from the elongated chromed taillight, the way the housing of the light was part of the tailfin, that the car was a Cadillac, probably an Eldorado. There was no need to point this out. He and this man, his passenger, were of the same generation. They were men from a world furnished with the same stuff—cars and attitudes and Old Crow. Long-suffering women.
The woman in the image was the man's wife, George assumed. Just from how the picture was composed and the way he'd said "her" The point is not her. (214)
*
"A king alone, without distractions, is a man of misery."
"So it's fine to be alone," George said, summarizing what he took from this aphorism. "So long as you have your distractions."
The man said that sounded about right. (215)
*
He was suddenly envious of that cashier, who wasn't looking for someone. Who was just doing her job, without having to manage a feeling of loss or doubt. (220)
March 6, 2026
As someone who grew up on the West Coast, the South can be an enigma of preconceived notions, some of them negative. Of course, this is unfair. The perspective of ignorance can be changed by exposure to things Southern, as well as traveling to the South itself.
William Agee's and Walker Evans' Let us Now Praise Famous Men is one introduction to individuals who inhabit the South. Writing by Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor, Tennessee Williams and William Faulkner are others. In 1976, William Eggleston's photography became the contemporary introduction to what the South looks like from the point of view of a native. His images were about seeing what was right in front of him, in a way that captures the mundane through a slightly different perspective. Eggleston helped to establish Southern viewpoints in photography, which over time became familiar.
This large format reprint of Eggleston's selected works from The Outlands allows us to see the photographs up close in book format. The essay by his son, William Eggleston, III, puts the photographer into context. It was good that William Christenberry, a close friend of Eggleston's, and another Southern photographer/artist was mentioned. Christenberry is less well-known, but his book, Southern Photographs captures the South in ways that parallels Eggleston's and should not be ignored.
William Agee's and Walker Evans' Let us Now Praise Famous Men is one introduction to individuals who inhabit the South. Writing by Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor, Tennessee Williams and William Faulkner are others. In 1976, William Eggleston's photography became the contemporary introduction to what the South looks like from the point of view of a native. His images were about seeing what was right in front of him, in a way that captures the mundane through a slightly different perspective. Eggleston helped to establish Southern viewpoints in photography, which over time became familiar.
This large format reprint of Eggleston's selected works from The Outlands allows us to see the photographs up close in book format. The essay by his son, William Eggleston, III, puts the photographer into context. It was good that William Christenberry, a close friend of Eggleston's, and another Southern photographer/artist was mentioned. Christenberry is less well-known, but his book, Southern Photographs captures the South in ways that parallels Eggleston's and should not be ignored.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews