WANAFOTO: Steidl

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07/04/24

Edward Burtynsky, Extraction / Abstraction, Steidl, 2024

Edward Burtynsky

Extraction / Abstraction

Steidl, 2024

Edward Burtynsky, Extraction / Abstraction

Edited by Marcus Schubert

Text by Simon Schama, Marc Mayer, Edward Burtynsky

Book design: Barr Gilmore, Jim Panou & Marcus Schubert

English, 240 pages, 30.5 x 23.5 cm, Hardback

€ 48.00 - ISBN 978-3-96999-313-2

Published on the occasion of Edward Burtynsky’s largest and most comprehensive exhibition to date, at the Saatchi Gallery, London, Extraction / Abstraction looks deeply at the key subjects and signature images spanning his 45-year career. Alongside Edward Burtynsky’s compelling photographs, the book includes texts by celebrated art historian Simon Schama, who examines Edward Burtynsky’s work in light of the question “Can art help save the world?”, and by curator Marc Mayer, former director of the National Gallery of Canada, who provides an overview of the photographer’s achievements as technician, journalist and artist.

Extraction / Abstraction presents a dichotomy of Edward Burtynsky’s image-making imperative: the lucid and informed documentation of large-scale extractive processes, and how he transforms the landscapes of industry into complete abstractions. Other essential themes in his oeuvre such as agriculture, manufacturing, infrastructure and waste also find their rightful place here. With more than 130 color plates, the book furthermore has a special section, the “Process Archive,” featuring previously unpublished, behind-the-scenes photographs of Edward Burtynsky at work on the ground and in the air throughout his career. The archive provides a glimpse into the artist’s progression through the evolution of the medium itself, from mid twentieth-century large-format analogue (film-based) cameras, through to twenty-first-century high-resolution digital technologies, including explorations into photogrammetry and augmented reality.

EDWARD BURTYNSKY - Biography

Edward Burtynsky is regarded as one of the world’s most accomplished contemporary photographers. Since the early 1980s Burtynsky’s imagery has explored the collective impact we as a species are exerting on the environment. Renowned for his sustained investigation of the “indelible human signature” caused by industrial incursions into the landscape, previous projects have explored mining, quarrying, manufacturing, agriculture, shipping, the production of oil, and the development of China. In addition, he has made three award-winning films with director Jennifer Baichwal, Manufactured Landscapes (2006), Watermark (2013) and Anthropocene: The Human Epoch (2018). Edward Burtynsky’s books with Steidl are China (2005), Quarries (2007), Oil (2009), Water (2013), Salt Pans (2016), Anthropocene (2018), Natural Order (2020) and African Studies (2023).

STEIDL

steidl.de

06/04/24

Artist Roni Horn Exhibition @ Museum Ludwig, Cologne - "Roni Horn: Give Me Paradox or Give Me Death" + Catalogue

Roni Horn

Give Me Paradox or Give Me Death

Museum Ludwig, Cologne

March 23 – August 11, 2024

Museum Ludwig presents Roni Horn: Give Me Paradox or Give Me Death, a solo exhibition of works by influential American artist Roni Horn. The exhibition includes over 100 works, spanning from the beginning of the artist’s decades long career to present day.

Roni Horn's work spans from photography to drawing, artist books, sculpture, and installation. Behind this openness lies the artist's understanding that everything in the world is mutable and cannot be subjected to fixed attribution. The exhibition at the Museum Ludwig examines this idea through three recurring themes in Roni Horn's work: nature, identity, and language.

The title of the exhibition is derived from a quote by Patrick Henry, an advocate for American independence in the eighteenth century, who concluded a speech with the words, “Give me liberty or give me death!” Roni Horn is more interested in the visual power of the quote than its original context; in her adaptation of the structure of Henry’s famous exclamation, she substitutes the word "paradox" for "liberty", thus equating the meanings of both terms. For Roni Horn, paradoxes are a way to access ambiguity, a quality in which things may contain their opposites.

Upon entering the exhibition, viewers are greeted by This is Me, This is You (1997-2000), a photographic work installed on two opposing walls. Each wall contains 48 framed photographs of the artist’s niece, which were taken over a two-year period during her adolescence. Every photograph corresponds with one on the opposing wall, showing subtle changes between split seconds. As she explains in a 1989 interview, “The pair form, by virtue of the condition of being double, actively refuses the possibility of being experienced as a thing in itself.” Here, Horn not only employs doubles or pairs, but also speaks to identity’s constant flux.

Yilmaz Dziewior, curator of the exhibition, comments, “Roni Horn began exploring fluid representations of gender long before terms such as 'genderqueer' and 'nonbinary' entered public discourse. In her (self-)portraits, you see a person who fluctuates between genders without needing to find a specific term to describe this mode of being. She shows humans as organisms constantly manifesting themselves in a state of perpetual transformation. While extremely precise and highly aesthetic, her objects, photographs, and drawings have a liberating and emancipatory potential because they are often intangible and indefinable.”

Moving through the exhibition, viewers encounter never before exhibited drawings from the late 1970s, in addition to a selection of pigment drawings produced between 1983 and 2018.

Photographic works on view include the seminal work Still Water (The River Thames, for Example) (1999), comprised of 15 photographs which act as a portrait of the River Thames in Southern England; a.k.a. (2008-09), which depicts the artist at different moments throughout her life, and Portrait of an Image (with Isabelle Huppert) (2005-06), where Horn has photographed actress Isabelle Huppert posing as characters from her films.

Sculptures in the exhibition include works from the series When Dickinson Shut Her Eyes (1993-2008), where Roni Horn has recreated poems by Emily Dickinson; Gold Field (1980/1994), a work composed of 99.99% gold foil; and Untitled (“The tiniest piece of mirror is always the whole mirror.”) (2022), a ten-unit solid cast glass work that reflects its surrounding environment.

RONI HORN

Roni Horn was born in New York in 1955. She graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1975. In 1978, Roni Horn graduated with a master’s degree in sculpture from Yale University. Her oeuvre focuses on conceptually oriented photography, sculpture, drawing, and books. Since 1975, Roni Horn has traveled extensively in the more remote landscapes of Iceland. These solitary experiences have long been important influences in her life and work. Literature and Roni Horn’s prodigious reading have had a similarly profound impact on her work across various media.

Recent solo exhibitions include: Tate Modern, London; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria; Kunsthalle Hamburg, Germany; Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland; Fundació Joan Miro, Barcelona; De Pont Foundation, Tilburg, The Netherlands; Fondation Beyeler, Riehen, Switzerland; Glenstone Museum, Potomac, MD; Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich; Menil Drawing Institute, Houston, TX; Pola Museum of Art, Hakone, Japan; Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection, Paris; Winsing Arts Foundation, Taipeh; Centro Botín, Santander, Spain; He Art Museum, Guangdong, China. This year, in addition to the exhibition at Museum Ludwig, Roni Horn have a major solo show at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebaek, Denmark.

Roni Horn: Give Me Paradox or Give Me Death

The exhibition is accompanied by the catalogue Roni Horn: Give Me Paradox or Give Me Death, ed. by Yilmaz Dziewior; with text contributions by Yilmaz Dziewior, Zoë Lescaze, Andrew Maerkle, Isabel de Naverán, and Kerstin Stakemeier; German/English. Hardcover, 312 pages, 21.5 × 27.5 cm, approx. 180 col. ill., Steidl Verlag, Co-published with the Museum Ludwig - ISBN 978-3-96999-379-8

MUSEUM LUDWIG, COLOGNE

Heinrich-Böll-Platz, 50667 Köln

www.museum-ludwig.de

Gordon Parks: Born Black. A Personal Report on the Decade of Black Revolt 1960-1970, Steidl / The Gordon Parks Foundation

Gordon Parks: Born Black

A Personal Report on the Decade of Black Revolt 1960-1970

Steidl / The Gordon Parks Foundation, 2024

Gordon Parks, Born Black

Edited by Peter W. Kunhardt, Jr. and Michal Raz-Russo

Text by Jelani Cobb, Nicole R. Fleetwood, Peter W. Kunhardt, Jr. and Michal Raz-Russo

Book design by Holger Feroudj / Steidl Design

304 pages, 202 images, 25 x 29 cm, Hardback, English, € 58.00

ISBN 978-3-96999-228-9

Originally published in 1971, Gordon Parks’ Born Black was the first book to unite his writing and his photography. It was also the first to provide a focused survey of Gordon Parks’ documentation of a crucial time for the civil rights and Black Power movements. Today, more than 50 years later, this expanded edition of Born Black illuminates Gordon Parks’ vision for the book and offers deeper insight into the series within it. The original publication featured nine articles commissioned by Life magazine from 1963 to 1970—some never-before published—supplemented with later commentary by Parks and presented as his personal account of these important historical moments. Born Black includes the original text and images, as well as additional photographs from each series, spreads from the 1971 book, early correspondence, reproductions of related Life articles, and new scholarly essays. The nine series selected by Gordon Parks for Born Black—a rare glimpse inside San Quentin State Prison; extensive documentation of the Black Muslim movement and the Black Panthers; his commentaries on the deaths of civil rights leaders Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr.; intimate portrait studies of Stokely Carmichael, Muhammad Ali and Eldridge Cleaver; and a narrative of the daily life of the impoverished Fontenelle family in Harlem—have come to define his legendary career as a photographer and activist. This reimagined, comprehensive edition of Born Black highlights the lasting legacy of these projects and their importance to our understanding of critical years in American history. Co-published by Steidl with The Gordon Parks Foundation.

GORDON PARKS - Biography

Gordon Parks (1912–2006) was a photographer, filmmaker, musician and author whose 50-year career focused on American culture, social justice, race relations, the civil rights movement and the Black American experience. Born into poverty and segregation in Fort Scott, Kansas, Parks was awarded the Julius Rosenwald Fellowship in 1942, which led to a position with the Farm Security Administration. By the mid-1940s he was working as a freelance photographer for publications such as Vogue, Glamour and Ebony. Gordon Parks was hired in 1948 as a staff photographer for Life magazine, where for more than two decades he created groundbreaking work. In 1969 he became the first Black American to write and direct a major feature film, The Learning Tree, based on his semi-autobiographical novel, and his next directorial endeavor, Shaft (1971), helped define a film genre. Gordon Parks continued photographing, publishing and composing until his death in 2006.

STEIDL

steidl.de

08/11/22

Edward Burtynsky: African Studies @ Flowers Gallery, London

Edward Burtynsky: African Studies

Flowers Gallery, London

14 October - 19 November 2022

EDWARD BURTYNSKY

Sishen Iron Ore Mine #5, Tailings, Kathu, South Africa, 2018

Pigment Inkjet Print on Kodak Professional Photo Paper

courtesy of Flowers Gallery, London and

Nicholas Metivier Gallery, Toronto

EDWARD BURTYNSKY

Desert Spirals #4, Verneukpan, Northern Cape, South Africa, 2018

Pigment Inkjet Print on Kodak Professional Photo Paper

courtesy of Flowers Gallery, London and

Nicholas Metivier Gallery, Toronto

“I’m finding new visual resonances emerging while photographing in Africa. As I evolve my use of the aerial perspective, in these recent pictures I am surveying two very distinct aspects of the landscape: that of the earth as something intact, undisturbed yet implicitly vulnerable... and that of the earth as opened up by the systematic extraction of resources.” - Edward Burtynsky

Flowers Gallery presents an exhibition of new work by Edward Burtynsky produced across the African continent between 2015-2019.

Edward Burtynsky’s works chronicle the major themes of terraforming, extraction, agriculture and urbanization, developing a long-standing preoccupation with the unsettling reality of the human imprint on the planet.

In African Studies, Edward Burtynsky reflects on landscapes undergoing rapid industrial and manufacturing expansion. Focusing on Sub-Saharan Africa, his images present environments shaped by processes of resource extraction, from the salt pans of Senegal to the ‘residual landscapes’ of mechanized extraction such as Sishen Iron Ore Mine #5, Tailings, Kathu, South Africa, 2018. Images of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD #8, Benishangul-Gumuz Region, Ethiopia, 2019) reflect an ongoing enquiry into the global theme of water and its related environmental and geo-political impacts.

Alongside industrialised landscapes, Edward Burtynsky presents images of the pristine natural environment as a reminder of its fragility and finitude, such as the rich sculptural topography of Sand Dunes #3, Sossusvlei, Namib Desert, Namibia, 2018; and the unaltered ecosystem of the Rift Valley in northern Kenya in Flamingos #1, Lake Bogoria, 2017.

Photographed predominantly from aerial viewpoints, Edward Burtynsky’s works often have a flattened frontal aspect, transforming the image into sumptuously graduating colour fields or vigorous grid-like compositions, strikingly reminiscent of Modernist abstraction. Presented at a large scale, and with compelling detail, their painterly surfaces and gestural marks reveal the coalescing designs of both nature and human infrastructure. Edward Burtynsky’s perpetual search for abstraction within the landscape navigates a fine balance between form and content. He describes this dualistic approach as “keeping two doors open” for the viewer to enter the work - leading an enquiry into the expansive subject matter, while exploring the image as a mode of intuitive sensory expression.

This exhibition coincides with the expected publication of African Studies, a new book by Edward Burtynsky by Steidl (Not yet published).

Edward Burtynsky

African Studies

Publisher: Steidl, 2022

208 pages, 154 images

Hardback / Clothbound, 36.4 x 28.8 cm

ISBN 978-3-96999-145-9

Book Cover © Edward Burtynsky / Steidl

EDWARD BURTYNSKY

Edward Burtynsky’s works are in the collections of over sixty museums around the world, including Museum of Modern Art and Guggenheim, New York; Tate, London; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; and the National Gallery of Canada. Exhibitions have included Anthropocene (2018), which premiered simultaneously at the Art Gallery of Ontario and National Gallery of Canada before travelling to Manifattura di Arti, Sperimentazione e Tecnologia (MAST), Bologna in Spring 2019; Water (2013) at the New Orleans Museum of Art & Contemporary Art Center, New Orleans, Louisiana (international touring exhibition); Oil (2009) at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. (five-year international touring show), China (toured 2005 - 2008); Manufactured Landscapes at the National Gallery of Canada (touring from 2003 - 2005); and Breaking Ground produced by the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography (touring from 1988 - 1992).

Edward Burtynsky and filmmakers Jennifer Baichwal and Nicholas de Pencier have created a trilogy of films - Manufactured Landscapes (2006), Watermark (2013), and Anthropocene. Edward Burtynsky received the inaugural TED Prize in 2005; and won the Tiffany Mark award in 2012. In 2006, he was named an Officer of the Order of Canada; and in 2016 he received the Governor General’s Award for Visual Arts. He holds six honorary doctorate degrees. His distinctions also include the National Magazine Award; MOCCA award; Outreach Award at Rencontres d’Arles; ICP Infinity Award; the Kraszna Krausz Book Award; and was honoured as Master of Photography at Photo London in 2018; and Outstanding Contribution to Photography at the Sony World Photography Awards in 2022.

His recently released project In the Wake of Progress, a fully choreographed blend of photographs and film from his 40-year career premiered as a public art piece in Yonge-Dundas Square, Toronto, ON, Canada in June 2022 as part of the Luminato Festival, and was transformed into a new indoor immersive experience from June 25 – July 17, 2022 at the Canadian Opera Company Theatre, Toronto, ON, Canada. In the Wake of Progress will embark on a global tour beginning Autumn 2022.

FLOWERS GALLERY

21 Cork Street, London W1S 3LZ

www.flowersgallery.com

28/06/19

RongRong @ The Walther Collection, NYC - Day After Day. RongRong and the Beijing East Village - Exhibition + Book

Day After Day. RongRong and the Beijing East Village
The Walther Collection, New York
Through October 12, 2019

RONGRONG

1994 No. 20 (Zhang Huan, "12 Square Meters"), 1994.

But here in the East Village, we do almost everything. Curse plays rock music and writes poetry. Kongbu curates and writes criticism. Zhang Huan, Ma Liuming, and Zhu Ming do performances … But I am the only photographer. Everyone left their hometown and seeks dreams here from afar. We are all children who left home, which makes us constantly hungry …–RongRong

The Walther Collection, with Three Shadows Photography Art Centre in Beijing, presents Day After Day: RongRong and the Beijing East Village. The exhibition features 40 of RongRong’s seminal photographs from 1993-1998 portraying the Beijing East Village—an artistic community poignantly described as “a meteor in the history of contemporary Chinese art.” (Silvia Fok, “Photography, Performance Art, and the Beijing East Village,” in RongRong’s Diary: Beijing East Village (Göttingen: Steidl Verlag, 2019). Day After Day coincides with the publication of RongRong’s Diary: Beijing East Village by The Walther Collection and Steidl.

Nearly four years after the Tiananmen student protests in 1989, RongRong, then a 25-year-old from the southern province of Fujian, joined a group of young and struggling bohemian artists who settled in a desolate village on the outskirts of Beijing. RongRong captured the quotidian yet eruptive life of this community, as many of his fellow artists pushed their bodies to the brink to create radical and subversive performances. Considered highly disruptive by political authorities, these artists lived under constant fear of harassment, raids, and arrests. Both as a principal photographer and essential collaborator, RongRong faithfully documented what remain some of the most powerful and important performance works of Chinese contemporary art, by artists such as Zhang Huan, Ma Liuming, and Ai Weiwei.

The exhibition Day After Day emphasizes these explosive performance art activities in the village, before and after it was forcefully evacuated in the summer of 1994. RongRong’s emotive photographs will be paired with excerpts from a diary that RongRong kept during his stay in the village, as well as his present-day recollections. Such writings provide essential insight into the performances as they were being conceptualized and carried out, such as the extreme heat and squalid conditions of the public latrine that was the setting for Zhang Huan’s 12 Square Meters; the ominous arrest of artists and viewers that followed Ma Liuming’s groundbreaking nude performance Fen-Ma Liuming’s Lunch; and the chilly evening when the collaborative Primordial Sounds took place beneath a Beijing overpass.

RongRong’s Diary: Beijing East Village

150 pages, 124 images

26 x 21 cm, Cloth-bound hardcover

Published by Steidl / The Walther Collection; June 2019

The Walther Collection has worked closely with RongRong to produce the monograph RongRong’s Diary, which features a near-comprehensive compilation of the artist’s writings from this period. In short journal entries and personal correspondence with his sister, RongRong recounts his blossoming friendships with fellow artists, memorable outings and incidents, and their guerrilla approaches to staging new works. In doing so, he offers reflections both mundane and profound: adjusting to his new life in Beijing, deep anxiety about police backlash, and wavering faith in what photography can achieve in turbulent times. With over 120 images, RongRong’s Diary includes never-before-seen photographs selected by RongRong to highlight everyday life in the Beijing East Village and to call attention to a number of lesser-known performances. The book’s interplay between RongRong’s images and texts creates an absorbing personal narrative of an artist coming into his own.

RongRong was born in Fujian Province, China, in 1968. He was a key member of the Beijing East Village group, experimenting with photography and documenting the performances of his fellow artists in the early 1990s. These works have attained an almost mythic status in the history of contemporary Chinese experimental art. In 2007 RongRong and his wife and photographic partner inri founded Three Shadows Photography Art Centre in Beijing, emphasizing international collaborations and the creation of a sustainable infrastructure for young Chinese artists. RongRong’s best-known works include the 1990s East Village and Ruins series, as well as his collaborations with inri since 2000 such as In Fujisan, Liulitun, and Tsumari Story. Their joint work explores the beauty of the human body in nature and the urban environment, as well as the development of their family. His work has been exhibited worldwide during the past three decades, and is held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; the Myriam and Guy Ullens Foundation, Beijing; the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, and several distinguished private foundations.

The Walther Collection Project Space
526 West 26th Street, Suite 718, New York, NY 10001
www.walthercollection.com

15/05/18

Saul Leiter @ Howard Greenberg Gallery, NYC + Book In My Room, published by Steidl

Saul Leiter: In My Room

Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

May 10 - June 30, 2018

Saul Leiter’s intimate photographs of his muses over three decades is on view at Howard Greenberg Gallery. Deeply personal and contemplative, many of the images in Saul Leiter: In My Room share tender moments underscored by the subjects’ trust in the photographer.

SAUL LEITER

In My Room, Steidl, 2018

The exhibition, which includes work from the mid-1940s through the early 1960s, is the subject of a book, also titled In My Room, published by Steidl.

Many of the 35 photographs in the exhibition are on public view for the first time.

Fed by thrilling recent discoveries from Saul Leiter’s archive, the exhibition reveals the world of the artist and the women in his life through his studies of the female figure. Often illuminated by the lush natural light of Saul Leiter’s studio in New York City’s East Village, these black-and-white images uncover the mutual and empathetic collaboration between the artist and his subjects.

In the 1970s, Saul Leiter planned to make a book of his nudes, but never realized the project in his lifetime. The exhibition and upcoming book offer a first-time look at this body of work, which Leiter began on his arrival in New York in 1946 and continued throughout the next two decades. Leiter, who was also a painter, incorporates abstract elements into these photographs and often shows the influence of his favorite artists, including Bonnard, Vuillard, and Matisse.

The prolific Saul Leiter, who painted and took pictures fervently up to his death, worked in relative obscurity well into his eighties. Saul Leiter preferred solitude in life, and resisted any type of explanation or analysis of his work. With In My Room, he ushers viewers into his private world while retaining his strong sense of mystery.

Saul Leiter made an enormous and unique contribution to photography with a highly prolific period in New York City in the 1940s and ’50s. His abstracted forms and radically innovative compositions have a painterly quality that stands out among the work of his New York School contemporaries.

SAUL LEITER (1923-2013) was born in Pittsburgh, the son of a rabbi who was a distinguished Talmudic scholar. In 1946, he moved to New York City to pursue his painting. Shortly after his arrival in New York he met the Abstract Expressionist painter Richard Pousette-Dart, who was experimenting with photography. Leiter’s friendship with Pousette-Dart, and soon after with W. Eugene Smith, and the photography exhibitions he saw in New York, particularly Henri Cartier-Bresson at the Museum of Modern Art in 1947, inspired his growing interest in photography.

Edward Steichen included Saul Leiter’s black-and-white photographs in the exhibition Always the Young Strangers at the Museum of Modern Art in 1953. In the late 1950s the art director Henry Wolf published Saul Leiter’s color fashion work in Esquire and later in Harper’s Bazaar. Saul Leiter continued to work as a fashion photographer for the next 20 years and was published in Show, Elle, British Vogue, Queen, and Nova.

In the early 1980s Saul Leiter was faced with financial difficulties that forced the closure of his Fifth Avenue commercial studio. For the next two decades he lived and worked almost in obscurity. In 2006, with the help of writer/curator Martin Harrison and Howard Greenberg Gallery, the groundbreaking monograph Saul Leiter: Early Color was published by Steidl in Germany. The “little” book became an overnight sensation with worldwide distribution and firmly established Leiter as an early pioneer in the history of color photography. In 2006, the Milwaukee Museum of Art held the first US museum show of Saul Leiter’s photographs.

Saul Leiter’s work has been prominently featured in solo museum and gallery shows in the U.S. and Europe. His work is in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Baltimore Museum of Art; the Victoria and Albert Museum; the National Gallery of Australia; the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Milwaukee Art Museum; and the Yale University Art Gallery, among others.

About the Saul Leiter Foundation

The Saul Leiter Foundation, founded in 2014, is dedicated to preserving the art and legacy of the American photographer and painter Saul Leiter, and to the appreciation, advancement, and conservation of photographic works worldwide. The foundation maintains an archive of Saul Leiter’s artwork and operates activities to promote the medium of photography through educational programs, exhibitions, books, and licensing. The SLF is working toward completing a catalogue raisonné to be made available for study by students, curators, writers, and art professionals. For more information, visit saulleiterfoundation.org.

HOWARD GREENBERG GALLERY

41 East 57th Street, New York, NY 10022

www.howardgreenberg.com

06/10/16

William Eggleston: The Democratic Forest

William Eggleston
The Democratic Forest
Published by Steidl 2015

William Eggleston

The Democratic Forest

Published by Steidl 2015

Edited by Mark Holborn and William Eggleston III

Texts by Mark Holborn and Eudora Welty

Book design by Gerhard Steidl and Duncan Whyte

Following the publication of Chromes in 2011 and Los Alamos Revisited in 2012, the reassessment of William 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.