Carol Vogel explains why the Whitney is so chuffed to have acquired a baker’s dozen of William Eggleston’s images after a recent show drew 120,000 visitors to the museum:
Eggleston Artistic Trust/Cheim & Read, New York, Whitney Museum
“This considerably strengthens our holdings of his classic period from the late ’60s and early ’70s, primarily his color photography shot in his home city of Memphis and around the Mississippi Delta, where he frequently traveled,” said Elisabeth Sussman, the Whitney’s photography curator. “There are also a number of portraits taken in the 1970s at the time he was filming videos and taking portraits in nightclubs that have rarely been shown.”
The gift also includes several images from “Lost and Found,” part of Mr. Eggleston’s Los Alamos series, a body of photographs that have remained unseen for decades because until recently no one knew that they belonged to Walter Hopps, Mr. Eggleston’s close friend and curator who died in 2005. The works from this series chronicle road trips the artist took with Mr. Hopps, leaving from Memphis and traveling as far as the West Coast.
