William Eggleston s standing as one of the masters of colour photography is widely acknowledged. But the gradual steps by which he transformed from an unknown into a leading artist are less well known. Steidl has undertaken to trace these steps in an ambitious series of publications. Before Color (Steidl, 2010) explored Eggleston s revelatory early black and white images, while Chromes is an edit of more than 5,000 Kodachromes and Ektachromes taken from ten chronologically ordered binders found in a safe in the Eggleston Artistc Trust. This archive had once been used by John Szarkowski who selected the forty-eight 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in Eggleston s seminal book William Eggleston s Guide, while the rest of the archive has remained almost entirely unpublished.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 colour and compositional strategies, and the development towards the  poetic snapshot . In short, Chromes shows a master in the making.