5x7

First edition, first printing. Hardcover. Fine olive-green cloth-covered boards with title stamped in black on spine, with photographically illustrated dust jacket. Photographs by William Eggleston. Essay by Michael Almereyda. Includes two-sided four-color poster (22 x 14 3/4 inches) for Eggleston's film "Stranded in Canton" (recto), and Almereyda's film "William Eggleston in the Real World" (verso). Designed by Jack Woody. Unpaginated (120 pp.), with 32 four-color and 29 black and white plates, the essay text printed blue, gray and black; all beautifully printed on heavy matt stock. 14 1/4 x 10 7/8 inches. This first edition was limited to 4000 hardbound copies. One of the very best monographs of Eggleston's work published to-date! Out of print. CONDITION: New in publisher's shrink-wrap. From the publisher: "William Eggleston's latest monograph features photographs taken during the early 1970s using a large format 5x7 camera. While the book includes imagery typical of the Eggleston oeuvre-- streetscapes, parked automobiles, portraits of the strange and disenfranchised--the book also offers never-before-published photographs taken in the nightclubs Eggleston used to frequent." According to Walter Hopps, "With it [his camera and portable strobes] Eggleston could shoot in virtual darkness in the juke joints and clubs around Memphis. The portraits are offhand and spontaneous but insistently stark; their brutality is heightened by the absence of color. The portraits have a leveling effect--whether biker or debutante, the people Eggleston photographed are clearly denizens of the same realm. [He] is reminding us: look closely, each of these individuals is subtly different." And from Johanna Burton, in Artforum: "Riveting as the sitters' accoutrements are, most compelling is the way in which each person is at once magnifed--laid bare and vulnerable. . . . Staring, smiling, grimacing, glowering, these are less portraits of 'individuals' than of the expressions that settle fleetingly on their malleable features. Each face feels stranger and more physically ambivalent than the next."