About the Author

Over the course of nearly six decades, William Eggleston has established a singular pictorial style
that deftly combines vernacular subject matter with an innate and sophisticated understanding of
color, form, and composition. His photographs transform the ordinary into distinctive, poetic images
that eschew fixed meaning. His 1976 solo exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, New York,
curated by John Szarkowski, marked one of the first presentations of color photography at the
museum. Although initially criticized for its unfamiliar approach, the show and its accompanying
catalogue, William Eggleston's Guide, heralded an important moment in the medium’s acceptance
within the art-historical canon, and it solidified the artist’s position as one of its foremost practitioners
to date. Eggleston’s work continues to exert an influence on contemporary visual culture at large.

Rachel Kushner is the author of the novels The Mars Room, The Flamethrowers, and Telex from
Cuba, as well as a book of short stories, The Strange Case of Rachel K. Her most recent book, The
Hard Crowd, offers twenty years of essays on politics, art, and culture. She is a Guggenheim
Foundation Fellow and the recipient of the Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award from the American
Academy of Arts and Letters. She has won the Prix Médicis and been a finalist for the Booker Prize
and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and was twice a finalist for the National Book Award in
Fiction. Her books have been translated into twenty-six languages. Her fiction has appeared in The
New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Harper’s Magazine, and her essays in Artforum, Bookforum,
and The New York Times Magazine. She lives in Los Angeles.

Robert Slifkin is a professor of fine arts at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, where he
teaches classes on modern and contemporary art and photography. He is the author of The New
Monuments and the End of Man: U.S. Sculpture Between War and Peace, 1945–1975 and Out of
Time: Philip Guston and the Refiguration of Postwar American Art, which was awarded the Phillips
Book Prize. His essays and reviews have appeared in such journals as American Art, Artforum, The
Art Bulletin, Art Journal, Burlington Magazine, October, Oxford Art Journal, and Racquet.