William Eggleston: 2 1/4

A tribute to Eggleston’s brief experimentation with pocket-sized photographs

Born and raised in Mississippi and Tennessee, photographer William Eggleston began taking pictures in the early 1960s after reading Henri Cartier-Bresson’s The Decisive Moment. After switching from black-and-white film to color film in 1966, he occasionally used a two and one quarter inch format for photographs. This collection of square snapshots from 1966 to 1971 invokes the intimate quality of Eggleston’s work, while maintaining the vibrance and skill that led Museum of Modern Art curator John Szarkowski to call him “the first color photographer.” This attractive clothbound, square-shaped hardcover volume includes 45 four-color plates with text by Los-Angeles based novelist and screenwriter Bruce Wagner. Now in its ninth edition, 2 ¼ adds more classic Eggleston images to the canon of color photography.
William Eggleston (born 1939) encountered photography and abstract expressionism while studying at Vanderbilt and the University of Mississippi. Inspired by the work of Robert Frank and Henri Cartier-Bresson, Eggleston began working with color film in the 1960s and is credited with popularizing its use among artistic photographers. His work can be found in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Whitney Museum of American Art.