For Now [2010 - 1ST EDITION & 1ST PRINTING - IN SHRINKWRAP]

Twin Palms, 2010. First Edition, First Printing. Hardcover. New/new. Twin Palms Publishers, Santa Fe, New Mexico, 2010. Hardcover in pictorial dust jacket. First edition, first printing. Limited to only 3000 copies worldwide. 144 pages with 87 four-color plates. 13" x 12". Photographs by William Eggleston, selected by Michael Almereyda. Texts by Michael Almereyda, Lloyd Fonvielle, Greil Marcus and Amy Taubin. Interview with Eggleston by Kristine McKenna. Includes a list of plates. Designed by Michael Almereyda and Jack Woody. Book Condition: New/Fine (still in publisher's shrinkwrap). From the publisher: "For Now is the result of filmmaker Michael Almereyda's year-long rummage through the Eggleston archives, a remarkable collection of heretofore unseen images spanning four decades of work by one of our seminal artists. Unusual in its concentration on family and friends, the book highlights an air of offhand intimacy, typical of Eggleston and typically surprising." From Michael Almereyda: "William Eggleston's photographs are always about looking. They distill a sense of heightened attention--alertness, anticipation, awe--from fragments of ordinary, unmanipulated reality. But the 'ordinary' in Eggleston is often charged with an air of mystery and menace, a Halloween atmosphere leaking into every season he records. A quality of vulnerability and play converges with unease, dread, the possibility of mayhem. This new book, William Eggleston: For Now, presents over 90 previously unpublished color photographs pulled from Eggleston's back files, spanning four decades of work. The title is meant as an open nod to the immediacy of pictures plucked from near-oblivion, a salute to their freshness, their nowness. The selection is tidier, more self-contained, than I first expected--a bouquet brought back from an archival jungle. Most of the pictures feature people, and many of the subjects are the photographer's blood relations and close friends. The emotional temperature is at once tender and aloof, extending to images of strangers in parking lots and suburban yards, which is aligned with Eggleston's enduring fascination with frayed commercial spaces, cars, signs, cracked sidewalks, light bulbs, bricks, clouds, with rural porches, broken fences, spilled trash, ditches, puddles, architectural gaps and divides--the spaces between spaces, the mundane, the makeshift, all the fragmentary raw proofs of civilization as a perishable human construction that, nevertheless, provide subject matter for vibrant photographs. When I reviewed a rough layout with Bill, he was pleased to see so many pictures he had clean forgotten about. He offered his approval alongside a bemused comment that the book comes close to being a family album.