Los Alamos Revisited

Los Alamos Revisited is the complete edit of the pictures William Eggleston made on the road with Walter Hopps between 1965 and 1974, and it replaces the single Scalo volume of 2003 that showed only part of them.

Eggleston photographed while Hopps drove, working out from Memphis through the South and west across Texas into New Mexico, where the town of Los Alamos gave the series its name. The two men later edited the pictures into five portfolio boxes of dye-transfer prints, but the negatives ended up divided between them, with roughly half staying in Hopps' hands. What came back to the Eggleston Artistic Trust in Memphis was catalogued as Box #17. A second box turned up after Hopps died in 2005 and was catalogued as Box #83. William Eggleston III and Mark Holborn worked through the reunited negatives in 2011 and settled the sequence with Winston Eggleston at Steidl the following year. Steidl published it in September 2012 as three clothbound volumes in a linen slipcase, 12.5 inches square.

Eggleston began shooting colour negative film in Memphis in 1964 and moved to dye-transfer printing in the early 1970s. The 1976 exhibition John Szarkowski gave him at the Museum of Modern Art is the usual marker for colour being taken seriously in the medium. Los Alamos Revisited is the middle part of Steidl's reassessment of his archive, between Chromes (2011) and the ten-volume The Democratic Forest (2015).