On the eve of the 1976 election, William Eggleston traveled to Plains, Georgia, to photograph the hometown of Jimmy Carter. The landscapes he captured were overgrown yet restrained, rusting shacks and crooked tombstones. As he travels along the road from Mississippi to Georgia, the quiet buzz of anticipation grows. In Sumter, a car driving down the highway emerges from behind a small shack with advertisements painted on the side. In front, stalks of ryegrass bend with the wind. Every piece of the landscape, from its residents to the trees, is both fluid and static. The photographs in Election Eve emit an eerie quiet—a town on the precipice of transforming from a provincial backcountry to a presidential hometown.
Just months before, Eggleston had exhibited a controversial series of color photographs at the Museum of Modern Art that documented what one critic called the “perfectly banal” lives of white Southerners. It is likely that after seeing the exhibition at the MoMA, an editor at The New York Times Magazine asked Eggleston to photograph Carter’s hometown of Plains, Georgia. While the piece never materialized, the photographs he took on the trip were eventually collected in Election Eve, Eggleston’s first published work.
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