William Eggleston: The Democratic Forest

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.