A New Look at William Eggleston’s Southern Landscapes

In William Eggleston’s latest published collection, The Outlands, his two sons edited nearly one hundred never-before-seen photos for publication. Like their father—a Memphis native whose prolific career reimagined the power of color photography on a national stage—William Eggleston III and his brother, Winston Eggleston, found beauty in the ordinary and mundane. Together, the brothers processed more than five thousand Kodachrome slides taken between 1969 and 1974, dusting off images that had been untouched by their father for more than forty years. The pared-down result, The Outlands, compiled in a large-format paperback tome by David Zwirner Books, uncovers a nostalgic portrait of the South: a wood-paneled Oldsmobile Vista Cruiser on a dirt road; an amber iced tea at a cozy diner booth; a churchgoer in hot pink peering back at the camera behind her pew. “Dad has always positioned himself as an artist whose instrument is a camera,” writes William Eggleston III. “He took what was regarded as absolutely nothing, the ‘banal,’ and made something of it.”