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PUBLISHER
Steidl

PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date
Active

DISTRIBUTION
D.A.P. Exclusive
Catalog: FALL 2015 p. 27   

PRODUCT DETAILS
ISBN 9783869307923 SDNR50
List Price: $680.00 CAD $965.00

AVAILABILITY
Out of stock

TERRITORY
NA ONLY

THE FALL 2024 ARTBOOK | D.A.P. CATALOG

Artbook | D.A.P. Catalog Cover Link
Preview our FALL 2024 catalog, featuring more than 500 new books on art, photography, design, architecture, film, music and visual culture.
  

STEIDL

William Eggleston: The Democratic Forest

Edited by Mark Holborn, William Eggleston. Introduction by Mark Holborn. Text by Eudora Welty.

William Eggleston: The Democratic ForestFollowing the publication of Chromes in 2011 and Los Alamos Revisited in 2012, Steidl's reassessment of Eggleston's career continues with the publication of The Democratic Forest, his most ambitious project. This ten-volume set containing more than 1,000 photographs is drawn from a body of 12,000 pictures made by Eggleston in the 1980s. Following an opening volume of work in Louisiana, the ensuing volumes cover Eggleston's travels from his familiar ground in Memphis and Tennessee out to Dallas, Pittsburgh, Miami and Boston, the pastures of Kentucky and as far as the Berlin Wall. The final volume leads the viewer back to the South of small towns, cotton fields, the Civil War battlefield of Shiloh and the home of Andrew Jackson in Tennessee.
The "democratic" in Eggleston's title refers to a democracy of vision, through which the most mundane subjects are represented with the same complexity and significance as the most elevated. This work has rarely been shown and only a fraction of the entire oeuvre has ever been published; the exhaustive editing process has taken over three years. This gorgeous set includes a new introduction by Mark Holborn and the republication of Eudora Welty's original essay on the work.
William Eggleston was born in 1937 in Memphis, Tennessee. He took his first black-and-white photographs at age 18. His first color work was shot in 1964 in color negative film, but in the late 60s he began to use color slides. Eggleston was the subject of a landmark solo exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1976.
PRAISE AND REVIEWS

Bookforum

Prudence Peiffer

More than any other project by Eggleston, these photographs deliver his aesthetic, which, as the title gives away, is also a philosophy of democracy: the power of the ordinary, the beauty of contingency, the aim of a universalist view... Steidl has been steadily working to put Eggleston in wider circulation, and this anthology is a cause for celebration.

Cphmag.com

Joerg Colberg

It is as mesmerizing and fascinating and beautiful and infuriating and gratuitous and obscene and unresolved as the country it portrays, the country it makes us confront.

Artforum

Prudence Peiffer

[The Democratic Forest] is not to be missed...Eggleston’s quest for the subtle truths of the ordinary—he has said that he is “at war with the obvious”—is apparent in his framing of local color and quotidian detail.

Art in America

...a phone handset resting ominously on an embroidered bedsheet, a child in overalls poring over a gun catalogue, and what looks like a vacant outdoor snack shack...overlooked if not for Eggleston’s beguiling ability to perfectly frame and capture an environment’s color, geometry, and light.

The Daily Beast

Malcolm Jones

...a variegated portrait of the world in our time...to locate the extraordinary within the ordinary.

Arts Observer

D. Creahon

These moments in Eggleston’s work offer a fitting crystallization of his work, and more broadly, the act of seeing itself. Letting light play such a strong hand in his pieces, each work underscores his ability to capture moments of visual harmony, where the viewer is equally aware of the world just beyond the lens, as they are in the elements shaping it, and the act of seeing it in turn. At each point, Eggleston’s own hand rarely seems to enter too explicitly into view, a note that emphasizes his mastery all the more loudly.

Artnet

Amah-Rose Abrams

Expect trademark mastery of dappled light and keen yet gentle observations from the master of modern photography.

The Line

Stephanie Murg

William Eggleston is partial to impartiality. He professes to have no favorite photographs or subjects...his distinctive images float free of titles...What remains is hauntingly clear and vividly colored: the strangely obvious made obviously strange

The New Yorker

One of America’s greatest living photographers...Eggleston’s sensitivity to light and color, and to a peculiarly American melancholy, links his pictures to the paintings of Edward Hopper; far from creating a flat hierarchy of images, he revels in the glorious specificity of each one.

Photo-Eye Blog, Best of 2016

John Gossage

As fresh as the present moment

Vogue

Rebecca Bengal

The year’s major, massive photographic event... Whittled down to just 150 pictures in full, saturated Egglestonian color when it was published in 1989, the book now stretches to a vast expanse of images, most never before published, vividly illustrating his definition of what it means to photograph democratically—in other words, everything.

The New York Times Magazine

Teju Cole

The images are democratic in the sense of how varied and inclusive they are. Eggleston shoots parked cars, flower vases, cemeteries, gas stations and piles of dirt, and each photograph in these long, glorious sequences (there are 10 volumes in all, with titles like “Pittsburgh,” “Berlin” and “The Pastoral”) merits its place. There are few photographers whose images I would wish to see more than a thousand of in a single sitting. Eggleston is easily in that class.

Mother Jones

Mark Murrmann

Taken as a whole, this enormous collection is kind of like bellying up to a luxurious buffet—it's delicious, and overwhelming, but worth the heartburn.

Vogue

Rebecca Bengal

In his hands, the camera becomes a palpable, itinerant presence; the scope feels restless, filmic. Nothing was off limits, and nothing mattered more than anything else. The image of a child’s face—even the face of his own child—carried no more photographic weight than a rusted car door. That car door could be freighted with just as much feeling as one of the luminous large-format portraits: artistically, Eggleston approached and treated them the same.

Vogue

Rebecca Bengal

But to look at his photographs again, especially now, and even the ones you think you know well, is to induce a fresh vision. You stop being able to see the world the way you once did; you start seeing Egglestons everywhere.

William Eggleston: The Democratic Forest

STATUS: Out of stock

Temporarily out of stock pending additional inventory.

FROM THE ARTBOOK BLOG

CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 2/8/2016

William Eggleston: The Democratic Forest… reconfiguring the way we experience the world

William Eggleston: The Democratic Forest… reconfiguring the way we experience the world

"Though too frequently we see photographs that look like other photographs, occasionally a body of work surfaces for which there are almost no points of reference. The pictures then reconfigure the way we experience the world. The Democratic Forest is such a body. Its only point of photographic reference is its author's own work. Its epic nature—the fruit of unwavering perseverance—suggests a fiction. It portrays a land in transition, where the old and the new collide. There is a terminal air about the endeavor. In hindsight we see it as a world that is coming to a close, not as a brave new beginning. The work may indeed be the climax of the pre-digital age—the last great foray with film. Viewed in its fullest form thirty years after the pictures were made, The Democratic Forest is both descriptive, drawing on views of a now vanished America, and abstract. Its power is irreversible. You can't recover your innocence. Eggleston changes your view forever." –Mark Holborn continue to blog


FROM THE ARTBOOK BLOG

BLOG-EGGLESTON-DEMOCRATIC-FOREST-BOTTLES-ON-TABLE | DATE 2/9/2016

William Eggleston: The Democratic Forest

William Eggleston: The Democratic Forest, Bottles on Table

Featured image is reproduced from William Eggleston's American epic The Democratic Forest, just released in an astonishingly powerful ten-volume set from Steidl. Collecting more than one thousand photographs culled from twelve times as many made by the artist during the 1980s, this boxed set contains an Introduction by Eudora Welty—written in 1988, when she was nearly eighty. "These extraordinary, compelling, honest, beautiful and unsparing photographs all have to do with the quality of our lives in the ongoing world," she writes. "They succeed in showing us the grain of the present, like the cross-section of a tree. The photographs have cut it straight through the center." continue to blog


FROM THE ARTBOOK BLOG

CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 2/7/2016

William Eggleston: The Democratic Forest

William Eggleston: The Democratic Forest, Gulf Transport bus

"I am afraid that there are more people than I can imagine who can go no further than appreciating a picture that is a rectangle with an object in the middle of it, which they can identify. They don't care what is around the object as long as nothing interferes with the object itself, right in the center. Even after the lessons of Winogrand and Friedlander, they don't get it. They respect their work because they are told by important institutions that they are important artists, but what they really want to see is a picture with a figure or an object in the middle of it. They want something obvious. The blindness is apparent when someone lets slip the word 'snapshot.' Ignorance can always be covered by 'snapshot.' The word has never had any meaning. I am at war with the obvious." – William Eggleston, The Democratic Forest. continue to blog


WILLIAM EGGLESTON MONOGRAPHS + ARTIST'S BOOKS

William Eggleston: Mystery of the Ordinary

WILLIAM EGGLESTON: MYSTERY OF THE ORDINARY

Steidl/C/O Berlin

ISBN: 9783969992203
USD $65.00
| CAD $88

Pub Date: 12/12/2023
Active | Out of stock


William Eggleston: Chromes

WILLIAM EGGLESTON: CHROMES

Steidl

ISBN: 9783969990889
USD $500.00
| CAD $675

Pub Date: 10/11/2022
Active | In stock


William Eggleston: The Outlands

WILLIAM EGGLESTON: THE OUTLANDS

Steidl

ISBN: 9783958292659
USD $450.00
| CAD $630

Pub Date: 9/28/2021
Active | In stock


William Eggleston: The Outlands

WILLIAM EGGLESTON: THE OUTLANDS

Steidl

ISBN: 9783958292659
USD $450.00
| CAD $630

Pub Date: 9/28/2021
Active | In stock


William Eggleston: Musik (Vinyl)

WILLIAM EGGLESTON: MUSIK (VINYL)

Steidl

ISBN: 9783958292765
USD $85.00
| CAD $112.5

Pub Date: 6/24/2025
Forthcoming


William Eggleston: Polaroid SX-70

WILLIAM EGGLESTON: POLAROID SX-70

Steidl

ISBN: 9783958295032
USD $80.00
| CAD $115

Pub Date: 3/24/2020
Active | Out of stock


William Eggleston: Flowers

WILLIAM EGGLESTON: FLOWERS

Steidl

ISBN: 9783958293892
USD $80.00
| CAD $115

Pub Date: 3/24/2020
Active | In stock


William Eggleston: Morals of Vision

WILLIAM EGGLESTON: MORALS OF VISION

Steidl

ISBN: 9783958293908
USD $80.00
| CAD $115

Pub Date: 3/10/2020
Active | In stock


William Eggleston: Election Eve

WILLIAM EGGLESTON: ELECTION EVE

Steidl

ISBN: 9783958292666
USD $98.00
| CAD $135

Pub Date: 12/26/2017
Active | In stock


William Eggleston: The Democratic Forest

WILLIAM EGGLESTON: THE DEMOCRATIC FOREST

Steidl

ISBN: 9783869307923
USD $680.00
| CAD $965

Pub Date: 11/24/2015
Active | Out of stock


William Eggleston: At Zenith

WILLIAM EGGLESTON: AT ZENITH

Steidl

ISBN: 9783869307107
USD $65.00
| CAD $87

Pub Date: 3/15/2014
Active | In stock


William Eggleston's Guide

WILLIAM EGGLESTON'S GUIDE

The Museum of Modern Art, New York

ISBN: 9780870703782
USD $45.00
| CAD $60

Pub Date: 10/2/2002
Active | In stock


William Eggleston: 2 1/4

WILLIAM EGGLESTON: 2 1/4

Twin Palms Publishers

ISBN: 9780944092705
USD $75.00
| CAD $108 UK £ 67

Pub Date: 3/1/1999
Active | In stock


William Eggleston: For Now

WILLIAM EGGLESTON: FOR NOW

Twin Palms Publishers

ISBN: 9781931885935
USD $75.00
| CAD $108 UK £ 67

Pub Date: 12/1/2021
Active | In stock


William Eggleston: 5X7

WILLIAM EGGLESTON: 5X7

Twin Palms Publishers

ISBN: 9781931885485
USD $75.00
| CAD $108 UK £ 67

Pub Date: 1/1/2007
Active | In stock


William Eggleston: Stranded in Canton

WILLIAM EGGLESTON: STRANDED IN CANTON

Twin Palms Publishers

ISBN: 9781931885713
USD $45.00
| CAD $61 UK £ 35

Pub Date: 12/1/2008
Active | Out of stock