"Following the publication of Chromes in 2011 and Los Alamos Revisited in 2012, the reassessment of Eggleston's career continues with the publication of The Democratic Forest, his most ambitious project. This ten-volume set containing more than a thousand photographs is drawn from a body of twelve thousand pictures made by Eggleston in the 1980s. Following an opening volume of work in Louisiana, which serves as a visual preface, the remaining books cover Eggleston's travels from his familiar ground in Memphis and Tennessee to Dallas, Pittsburgh, Miami, 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, the President from Tennessee. The democracy of Eggleston's title refers to his democracy of vision, through which he represents the most mundane subjects with the same complexity and significance as the most elevated. The exhaustive editing process of The Democratic Forest--a rarely shown body of work of which only a fraction has been published to date--has taken over three years, and was guided by the belief that only on this large scale can the magnitude of Eggleston's achievement be represented. With no precedent in American art, Eggleston's photography seen as a whole has all the grandeur of an epic piece of fiction.--Publisher's Web site.

Over the course of nearly six decades, William Eggleston—often referred to as the “father of color photography”—has established a singular pictorial style that deftly combines vernacular subject matter with an innate and sophisticated understanding of color, form, and composition. Eggleston has said, “I am at war with the obvious.” His photographs transform the ordinary into distinctive, poetic images that eschew fixed meaning. Though criticized at the time, his now legendary 1976 solo exhibition, organized by the visionary curator John Szarkowski at The Museum of Modern Art, New York—the first presentation of color photography at the museum—heralded an important moment in the medium's acceptance within the art-historical canon and solidified Eggleston's position in the pantheon of the greats alongside Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Frank, and Walker Evans. Published on the occasion of David Zwirner's New York exhibition of selections from The Democratic Forest in the fall of 2016, this new catalogue highlights over sixty exceptional images from Eggleston's epic project. His photography is “democratic” in its resistance to hierarchy where, as noted by the artist, “no particular subject is more or less important than another.” Featuring original scholarship by Alexander Nemerov, this notable presentation of The Democratic Forest provides historical context for a monumental body of work, while offering newcomers a foothold in Eggleston's photographic practice.

Delving into critical and familiar themes of William Eggleston’s work, his recently revisited body of photographs, The Outlands, goes on a journey with him through the mythic and evolving southern landscape. Vibrant colors and a profound nostalgia echo throughout Eggleston’s breathtaking oeuvre. His motifs of signage, cars, and roadside scenes create an iconography of American vistas that inspired a generation of photographers. His experimental composition peers through layered scenes—an orange sunset dips into an abandoned diner as we observe from the cracked parking lot—expanding the boundaries of interior and exterior. These idiosyncratic moments are emblematic of Eggleston’s curated yet innovative practice.

Born and raised in Mississippi and Tennessee, William Eggleston began taking pictures during the 1960s after seeing Henri Cartier-Bresson's The Decisive Moment. In 1966 he changed from black and white to color film, perhaps to make the medium more his own and less that of his esteemed predecessors. John Sarkowski, when he was curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, called Eggleston the "first color photographer, " and certainly the world in which we consider a color photograph as art has changed because of Eggleston. From 1966 to 1971, Eggleston would occasionally use a two and one quarter inch format for photographs. These are collected and published here for the first time, adding more classic Eggleston images to photography's color canon.

The appreciation of Eggleston's work has come a long way since his pioneering 1976 exhibition, William Eggleston's Guide, at New York's Museum of Modern Art. He has been called the 'father of colour photography' and since the 1990s he is widely regarded as the leading and most influential colour photographer of the twentieth century. Ancient and Modern is a collection of photographs chosen from Eggleston's earliest photographs taken in the American South, Africa and England. The photographs depict subjects and objects from everyday life and it is Eggleston's unique ability to find beauty, and striking displays of colour, in ordinary scenes. Mark Holborn, in his illuminating introduction, writes about the dark undercurrent of these mundane scenes as viewed through Eggleston's lens: '[Eggleston's] subjects are, on the surface, the ordinary inhabitants and environs of suburban Memphis and Mississippi - friends, family, barbecues, back yards, a tricycle and the clutter of the mundane. The normality of these subjects is deceptive, for behind the images there is a sense of lurking danger.'

When William Eggleston's second artist's book Morals of Visions was first published in 1978 in a limited edition of fifteen, only a handful of lucky people were able to obtain it; it has since become a collectible rarity. That is now to change with this new Steidl edition, which re-imagines Morals of Visions as a trade book for the general public. The original Morals of Vision contains eight color coupler prints of Eggleston's archetypal still lifes, landscapes and portraits which glorify the banal and have since changed the history of color photography. "There is no particular reason to search for meaning," Eggleston has said of his work in general, a sentiment in contrast with the title Morals of Vision which suggests that there are indeed principles of a kind to be learnt from the images in this book. Yet the lessons in photos including those of a broom leaning again a wall, green grain silos in the fading light, and an off-center electric candle complete with fake wax, remain Eggleston's own ironic secret. 'I don't have a burning desire to go out and document anything. It just happens when it happens. It's not a conscious effort, nor is it a struggle.' -William Eggleston