William Eggleston's Guide, 1976
Author: William Eggleston
Publisher: The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Distributed by: The MIT Press, Cambridge Massachusetts | London, England
Essay by: John Szarkowski
The following is quoted from the original essay by John Szarkowski:
"In Eggleston's work...we see uncompromisingly private experience described in a manner that is restrained, austere, and public, a style not inappropriate for photographs that might be introduced as evidence in court."
"These pictures are fascinating partly because they contradict our expectations. We have been told so often of the bland, synthetic smoothness of exemplary American life, of its comfortable, vacant insentience, its extruded, stamped, and molded sameness, in a word its irredeemable dullness, that we have come half to believe it, and thus are startled and perhaps exhilarated to see these pictures of prototypically normal types on their familiar ground, grandchildren of Penrod, who seem to live surrounded by spirits, not all of them benign."