Landmark Books in All Fields
ItemID: #51332
Cost: $650.00

Democratic Forest

Eudora Welty

INSCRIBED FIRST EDITION OF EGGLESTON’S DEMOCRATIC FOREST, WITH 150 PROVOCATIVE COLOR HALFTONES

EGGLESTON, William. The Democratic Forest. Introduction by Eudora Welty. New York: Doubleday, (1989). Oblong quarto, original gray cloth, original dust jacket. $650.

First edition of these 150 representative color halftones, selected from among thousands shot by Eggleston during the 1980s, inscribed on the title page, “For Chuck Hull, 1997, William Eggleston.”

Before Eggleston, no one else had thought to photograph the rural South, and certainly not in this illuminating way. “Eggleston does not attempt to varnish, polish, clean up, or otherwise beautify his world… The unsentimental directness of his gaze results in pictures that, in turn, invite us to gaze and to consider. We see details that we might otherwise have overlooked and whose importance we might have slighted” (Stepan, 170). In his own words, “I’ve tried to approach things naturally” (Roth, 234). “Eggleston’s pictures are at once modest and monumental, vulgar and refined, ordinary and strange, prosaic and poetic, commonplace and unforgettable” (Parr & Badger, 265). In her introduction, Eudora Welty alerts us “familiarity will be what overwhelms us.”

A fine inscribed copy.

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