The Democratic Forest
The Democratic Forest runs to ten volumes and more than a thousand photographs. It is the fullest account of the work William Eggleston made in the 1980s, cut from a body of some twelve thousand pictures that had gone almost entirely unpublished.
The first volume stays in Louisiana. The rest follow Eggleston out from Memphis and Tennessee to Dallas, Pittsburgh, Miami and Boston. They reach the pastures of Kentucky and, at the far edge, the Berlin Wall. The last volume turns back south, to small towns and cotton fields, the battlefield at Shiloh, and Andrew Jackson's house in Tennessee. The democratic of the title means a democracy of vision, in which a freezer door gets the same attention as a monument. Mark Holborn and Eggleston spent over three years on the edit. Steidl published the set on 24 November 2015: ten clothbound volumes, 1,328 pages, in a dark blue slipcase. Holborn contributes a new introduction, and Eudora Welty's essay from the 1989 edition is reprinted.
That 1989 Doubleday volume ran to fewer than two hundred pages. It stood for the whole project for twenty-five years. Steidl's set is the third and largest part of its reassessment of Eggleston's archive, after Chromes (2011) and Los Alamos Revisited (2012). A one-volume selection drawn from it followed as The Democratic Forest: Selected Works.
