Biographical note

Over the course of nearly six decades, William Eggleston has established a singular pictorial style that deftly combines vernacular subject matter with an innate and sophisticated understanding of color, form, and composition. His photographs transform the ordinary into distinctive, poetic images that eschew fixed meaning. His 1976 solo exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, curated by John Szarkowski, marked one of the first presentations of color photography at the museum. Although initially criticized for its unfamiliar approach, the show and its accompanying catalogue, William Eggleston's Guide, heralded an important moment in the medium’s acceptance within the art-historical canon, and it solidified the artist’s position as one of its foremost practitioners to date. Eggleston’s work continues to exert an influence on contemporary visual culture at large.

Rachel Kushner is the author of the novels The Mars Room, The Flamethrowers, and Telex from Cuba, as well as a book of short stories, The Strange Case of Rachel K. Her most recent book, The Hard Crowd, offers twenty years of essays on politics, art, and culture. She is a Guggenheim Foundation Fellow and the recipient of the Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Los Angeles.

Robert Slifkin is a professor of fine arts at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, where he teaches classes on modern and contemporary art and photography. He is the author of The New Monuments and the End of Man: U.S. Sculpture Between War and Peace, 1945–1975 and Out of Time: Philip Guston and the Refiguration of Postwar American Art, which was awarded the Phillips Book Prize. His essays and reviews have appeared in such journals as American Art, Artforum, The Art Bulletin, Art Journal, Burlington Magazine, October, Oxford Art Journal, and Racquet.