[Untitled] Vintage Photograph, c. 1965

np, 1965. framed. Very Good. RARE, ALMOST CERTAINLY UNIQUE, VINTAGE BLACK-AND-WHITE PRINT FROM THE YEARS BEFORE EGGLESTON'S SWITCH TO COLOR. SIGNED BY EGGLESTON ON VERSO. In the early 2000's the William Eggleston Artistic Trust discovered in their archives a box containing Eggleston's earliest photography which, surprising to later students of Eggleston's famous work in color, were in black and white. The photographs were later exhibited by Cheim & Read gallery in their landmark show: William Eggleston, Precolor: The Black and White Pictures (8 Jan - 21 Feb 2004) and featured in Steidl's 2010 book, Before Color.

This is one of the discovered photos exhibited by Cheim & Read and in Steidl's book - signed in pen by Eggleston on the verso and with an assigned number from the Eggleston Artistic Trust (#0305.067).

As explained in Before Color: "The pictures in this book were taken from the mid sixties to the early seventies. The reproductions for this book were made from the original vintage prints that were printed by William Eggleston in his own darkroom in Memphis, TN at the time the pictures were taken." This print - reproduced in Before Color - was therefore printed by Eggleston and is almost certainly the only existing vintage print of this image.

It was through his early black-and-white work that Eggleston first developed the visual language that would later transform American photography. Long before the saturated dye-transfer prints and the landmark 1976 Museum of Modern Art exhibition that helped secure color photography's place within the fine arts, Eggleston was already photographing the ordinary architecture of the American South: diners, parking lots, cars, domestic interiors, supermarkets, and figures caught in apparently casual, even banal, moments.

In this image, two men sit outside a snack bar beneath a patterned wall of diamonds, stripes, and hard-edged tile. A parked car, scattered chairs, asphalt, shadows, and architectural diagonals give the scene a rigorous formal arrangement. What might have been a throwaway roadside view becomes something more disquieting and exact: an image of Southern everyday life rendered with the cool detachment and compositional intelligence that would define Eggleston's mature work.

EGGLESTON, WILLIAM. Untitled. Circa 1965. Vintage gelatin silver print on, flush-mounted on thick stock. Signed by William Eggleston on the reverse of the mount. Approx. 14 x 17 inches (full sheet); image 11 x 16 3/8 inches. Verso signed by Eggleston and with Cheim & Read inventory number EG.9115 and Eggleston Artistic Trust reference number EAT# 0305.067. Some soiling to verso, a few scratches near the top of the image visible in raking light. In frame used by Cheim & Read for their 2004 exhibition (frame with a couple of chips).

An outstanding early Eggleston image: a vintage black-and-white print showing the artist's "democratic" eye fully forming before the arrival of the color work that made him central to the history of postwar photography.