“THE BEAUTIFUL STRANGENESS OF AMERICAN LIFE”” FIRST EDITION OF LOS ALAMOS, SIGNED BY WILLIAM EGGLESTON, WITH LAID-IN COLOR PRINT ALSO SIGNED BY THE PHOTOGRAPHER

EGGLESTON, William. Los Alamos. Zürich, Berlin, New York: Scalo, (2003). Folio, original tan cloth, original photographic dust jacket. WITH: Laid-in vintage color print (measures 8 by 10 inches), signed below image, printed text on verso.

First edition, signed by Eggleston beneath the full-color image on the leaf preceding the title page, with 82 full-color plates, this signed copy accompanied by a laid-in promotional color print also signed by Eggleston, with printed text of New York’s Cheim & Read Gallery on the verso.

The 82 vibrant images of Los Alamos, selected from over 2200 taken from 1966-74, represent William Eggleston’s “first work in color.” Eggleston had intended this project “to render intelligible the way of seeing inherent in the artists’s ‘democratic camera” but it was interrupted by completion of his breakthrough Guide (1976). Curator Thomas Weski notably observes that in Los Alamos “we find ourselves exposed to the suggestive lure of the photographs that we cannot resist” (170). “As Walter Hopps has written, Eggleston has ‘irrevocably changed the way in which we look at the world in photographs” (Parr & Badger I:265). Through his work Eggleston has “defined the potential vocabulary of color” (Parr & Badger II:290). Here his distinctive vision “is on radiant display. He doesn’t look for the bizarre but somehow finds it everywhere, especially in scenes of placid normality. He can focus on a parked car’s red interior, the seat on the driver’s side twisted forward against the steering wheel, and infuse the scene with mystery… The bountiful strangeness of American life never seems to let him down” (New York Times). True first edition in tan cloth, issued in a small number. (Seven copies of a portfolio Los Alamos, containing 75 dye transfer prints, appeared in 2002.) This photobook issued coincident with a traveling exhibit that opened at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, Germany. Edited by the German curator Thomas Weski. Text in English and German. Laid-in signed vintage print with text on verso, issued by New York’s Cheim & Read gallery in January 1999, coincident with an exhibit of Eggleston’s photographs and publication of his portfolio Cadillac. See Roth, 234; Open Book, 308.

A fine signed copy.