This is the long-awaited reprint of William Eggleston's Chromes, the first in the ongoing series of boxed sets published by Steidl examining the entirety of Eggleston's seminal oeuvre. Eggleston's standing as one of the masters of color photography is widely acknowledged. But the gradual steps by which he transformed from an unknown into a leading artist are less well known. Chromes is an edit of more than 5,000 Kodachromes and Ektachromes taken from ten chronologically ordered binders found in a safe at the Eggleston Artistic Trust. This archive had once been used by John Szarkowski who selected the 48 images printed in Eggleston's seminal book William Eggleston's Guide, while the rest of the archive has remained almost entirely unpublished. This book presents Eggleston's early Memphis imagery, his testing of color and compositional strategies, and the development towards the "poetic snapshot." In short, Chromes shows a master in the making.

Born in Memphis in 1939, William Eggleston is regarded as one of the greatest photographers of his generation and a major American artist who has fundamentally changed how the urban landscape is viewed. He obtained his first camera in 1957 and was later profoundly influenced by Henri Cartier-Bresson's The Decisive Moment. Eggleston introduced dye-transfer printing, a previously commercial photographic process, into the making of artists' prints. His exhibition "Photographs by William Eggleston" at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1976 was a milestone. He was also involved in the development of video technology in the seventies. Eggleston is represented in museums worldwide, and in 2008 a retrospective of his work was held at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and at Haus der Kunst in Munich in 2009. Eggleston's books published by Steidl include Chromes (2011), Los Alamos Revisited (2012), The Democratic Forest (2015), Election Eve (2017), Morals of Vision (2019), Flowers (2019), Polaroid SX-70 (2019) and The Outlands (2021).