Customer Reviews

Ancient and Modern

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Although Amazon has the author listed as Mark Holborn, this is an excellent selection of photographs from the career of William Eggleston, one of the greatest of the modern photographers and acknowledged as the photographer who made color photography accepted as an art form. It's difficult to describe an Eggleston photograph because his subject is usually a non-subject. What other photographers take for subject matter, Eggleston ignores--he says he is at war with the obvious. He photographs democratically--everything is open to being transformed from the mundane and banal to an Eggleston print. If you have not seen his work before, it can leave you confused or it can leave you with a new awareness. His work has been an epiphany for me, a challenge that has been rewarding. I hold him in the same company as Walker Evans, Lee Friedlander and Robert Frank--photographers who cut the pathway other photographers now trod.

"Ancient and Modern" is currently out-of-print. It is a normal fate of photo books done in small editions and that's a real shame. I bought a used copy through Amazon and I'm very pleased with it despite it being a bit dogeared and beat up. Some of the print reproductions are not done well. The price of a used copy was high. Despite the condition and the less-than-steller print quality, the cost was worth it to me. Hopefully, this book will be reprinted in the future with improved reproductions. It deserves a wider audience.