Peder Lund is delighted to present the exhibition William Eggleston – Before Color, showing 37 of Eggleston’s black-and-white photographs from the 1960s.

Until recently, Eggleston’s black-and-white photographs from this period have received little attention. With the traveling retrospective William Eggleston: Democratic Camera, Photographs and Videos 1961-2008, and the exhibition catalogue published under the same title, a number of Eggleston’s black-and-white photographs have been presented. The exhibition opened in 2008 at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and later traveled to Haus der Kunst in Munich, Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington DC, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. In 2010 Steidl published the book William Eggleston – Before Colordevoted exclusively to his black-and-white photographs from the 1960s. In 2012, this exhibition in its entirety was exhibited at Nederlands Fotomuseum in Rotterdam.

William Eggleston (1939) was born in Memphis, Tennessee. As a young student, he discovered Henry Cartier-Bresson’s photographs through the monograph The Decisive Moment, which led to his interest in photography. It was particularly Cartier-Bresson’s choice of motifs and angles that fascinated Eggleston. It was not classical American landscape photography that inspired him, but immediate surroundings and everyday objects. These became his motifs, represented with a degree of fortuity, which comes to light by his choice of perspectives and the coarse-grained snapshot aesthetic that characterizes his early works.