The democratic forest

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Following the publication of Chromes and Los Alamos Revisited, the reassessment of Eggleston’s career continues with The Democratic Forest, his most ambitious project. This ten-volume set features over a thousand photographs from a collection of twelve thousand taken in the 1980s. It begins with a visual preface of work in Louisiana, followed by volumes showcasing Eggleston’s travels from Memphis and Tennessee to Dallas, Pittsburgh, Miami, Boston, Kentucky, and even the Berlin Wall. The final volume returns to the South, highlighting small towns, cotton fields, the Civil War battlefield of Shiloh, and Andrew Jackson's home. The title's democracy refers to Eggleston’s vision, where mundane subjects are depicted with the same complexity as elevated themes. The exhaustive editing process, which took over three years, aimed to represent the magnitude of Eggleston’s achievement on this large scale. His photography, viewed as a whole, carries the grandeur of an epic piece of fiction, with no precedent in American art. The Democratic Forest includes a new introduction by Mark Holborn and the re-publication of Eudora Welty’s original essay on the work.