NEW YORK, NY.- William Eggleston 414 is Harmony Korine and Juergen Teller's visual memoir of a road trip they took ten years ago with William Eggleston and his son, Winston, from Memphis to Mississippi. Featuring photos and short introductions by Korine and Teller, this record of their spontaneous, intimate journey captures their love for each other through the shared experience of the American road, and combines images of gas stations, abandoned trucks, evangelical households, banal landscapes and hotel rooms with candid portraits. Certain photos cleverly re-visit Eggleston’s own famous motifs—strings of colored electric lights, road signs, people in cars—and yet the star of the show is without doubt Eggleston himself, always impeccably groomed, whether seated at the kitchen table, holding the hand of cousin Maude Schuyler Clay, or playing the grand piano.
“We drove around for days. Miles and miles of dead barren cotton wool land, depressing countryside and abandoned towns. I asked Bill, ‘Where are we going? Where the fuck are you taking us?’ He replied laughing, ‘I wanted to show you nothing.’”—Juergen Teller.
Born in 1973 in Bolinas, California, Harmony Korine is a filmmaker, screenwriter and artist. He has written and directed cult films including Gummo (1997), Breakers (2012) and The Beach Bum (2019); and his paintings and photographs have been exhibited at institutions including the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, Kunsthalle Düsseldorf and Centre Pompidou, Paris. Korine’s first novel A Crackup at the Race Riots was published in 1998.
Juergen Teller, born in Erlangen, Germany, in 1964, studied at the Bayerische Staatslehranstalt für Photographie in Munich. His work has been published in influential magazines such as Vogue, System, i-D, POP and Arena Homme+, and has been the subject of solo exhibitions including those at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain in Paris and Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin. Teller won the prestigious Citibank Photography Prize in 2003, and from 2014 to 2019 held a professorship at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste Nürnberg. His books with Steidl include Louis XV (2005), Marc Jacobs Advertising, 1998–2009 (2009), Siegerflieger (2015), The Master IV (2019) and Handbags (2019).
