序言 ｜Foreword

Democracy has become a difficult word. Faith in the idea is no longer unquestioned. Over-assertion of the principle may have furthered its debasement, reducing it to a slogan. Even though we are conscious of its limits, democracy remains a banner to which we cling. William Eggleston's title, The Democratic Forest, provided a rallying point for the most ambitious and diverse project of his already prolific career. By the time of his retrospective exhibition at the Whitney Museum in New York in 2009, reference was made through the title of the exhibition, Democratic Camera, but the work itself remained largely unapproached. Its scale was so vast it appeared to have no parameters. There was no point of entry. The word 'democracy' has been widely employed, but the true substance of Eggleston's stated 'democratic' project has barely been touched, let alone appreciated. The word seems simple enough in its suggestion of an all-embracing view, however the scope of Eggleston's 'forest' is far from simple. Here his language reaches its greatest complexity. In theory photography is inescapably democratic, since it represents everything within the field of vision. It endows its subjects - the sublime, the terrible and the mundane - with equal status. The Victorians, pioneers of the medium, believed the camera could not lie. Photography created the perfect means with which to record the world. The man with the camera was at the scene of the crime, observing the troops in action or documenting our architectural heritage. He was gathering the evidence. On the other hand, the all-embracing view is far from coolly obiective. Every step of the photographic process is selective. Long before the digital age, the photograph was manipulated in the service of the rewriting of history or the invention of events. A photograph is as much a fiction as it was ever a fact.

The possibility that a photograph might present something more than simple description, however evocative, came from Stieglitz. As fervently as he opened up America to the thrust of European modernism, Stieglitz reinforced the identity of a wholly American art to which photography was enlisted as readily as painting. However rarified his Camera Work, he was embracing a broad American culture. The emergence of photographic traditions coincided with the assertion of photography as its own discipline with its newly written history and its democratic roots. Photography was employed to explore the landscape, the social patterns in the industrial heartland or western migration, as readily as, say, the vernacular architecture of country barn and church or sharecropper interior. The camera could point at all the strata of the nation itself-at the figures on the upper deck as well as those in the steerage.

No sooner had the discipline been established than photography was weakened under the weight of its own self-reference. Though too frequently we see photographs that look like other photographs, occasionally a body of work surfaces for which there are almost no points of reference. The pictures then reconfigure the way we experience the world. The Democratic Forest is such a body. Its only point of photographic reference is its author's own work. Its epic nature - the fruit of unwavering perseverance - suggests a fiction. It portrays a land in transition, where the old and the new collide. There is a terminal air about the endeavour. In hindsight we see it as a world that is coming to a close, not as a brave new beginning. The work may indeed be the climax of the pre-digital age - the last great foray with film. Viewed in its fullest form thirty years after the pictures were made, The Democratic Forest is both descriptive, drawing on views of a now vanished America, and abstract. Its power is irreversible. You can't recover your innocence. Eggleston changes your view forever.

Eggleston's work follows a progression from the early colour pictures made on transparency film, loosely titled The Chromes, out of which John Szarkowski selected the dye-transfer prints for William Eggleston's Guide at the Museum of Modern Art in 1976. A characteristic of the work from the Guide is the relatively simple structure of the photographs that were drawn from life in the expanding Memphis suburbs. In response to Szarkowski's observation of his frequent use of the diagonal as opposed to straight frontal views, Eggleston referred to the structure of the Confederate flag.

Some three thousand of Eggleston's photographs made on negative film over several road trips across America were then gathered under the title Los Alamos. The series provides a valuable step to assimilating the twelve thousand pictures of The Democratic Forest. The three-volume republication of Los Alamos reveals the emergence of the shopping mall, the parking lot and the proliferation of signage on the fringes of what had once been the Old South. New, urban sprawl was recorded by Eggleston as far as California. Though he created what now constitutes a significant document, his intention was not social or architectural observation, With his surprising new angles, especially around the doors, windows and mirrors of automobiles, Eggleston was also moving over the surfaces of the built environment, stripping the image of any recognizable descriptive quality in order to immerse himself in shapes of pure colour. The photographs were suspended between the descriptive view and the abstraction. They could display both elements simultaneously. When this language takes you over, a corner of blue sky becomes simply a blue triangle or a parked car in the foreground is stripped back to, say, a red horizontal meeting a grey border. From the rendering of everything on the same flattened plane, the conventional perspective, conspicuous in much of the Guide, was destroyed. You have to turn as far afield as Braque's Zen influenced late paintings, the studies of billiard tables and the Atelier suite, to sense a parallel rearrangement and diminishment of perspective. The ability to be both descriptive and abstract is inherent in any photograph, but Eggleston seemed to be exploiting the duality relentlessly and even unconsciously. By the time he was working on The Democratic Forest through the eighties, it was as if he was visually rewired. His language, though often further refined, was fully established. Its complexity or its layering only increased. What distinguished the 'forest' were its subjects and the scale on which Eggleston had created an American epic.

You could draw a map of The Democratic Forest. Its lines, radiating out like a target from a central axis in the South, would overturn conventional geography. The bull's eye in Memphis would lead through rural Tennessee rather than the Mississippi of Eggleston's childhood. The edited sequence contains a prefatory passage through Louisiana and skirts delicately along the back roads of Kentucky. It clusters around certain states of the Confederacy and indeed reaches a finale on the battlefield of Shiloh on the Tennessee River. The next ring progressing outwards from the central core would include Miami and a vast area of Pittsburgh, in between which we catch glimpses of Nashville and New Orleans. Still further would be Dallas, Boston and London. Odd European locations emerge - Austria, northern Italy, Cambridgeshire. Berlin would occupy a large zone on the perimeter. The border of the map would lie along the Berlin Wall itself.

I imagine it like one of those engraved maps you see on the walls of seventeenth-century Dutch interiors, in which you are never quite sure where the convoluted coastline ends and the ocean begins. The map would provide a depiction of how a personal landscape prioritises geography. The more familiar and travelled the location, the larger and more detailed its central representation. The outer edges would present the less detailed foreign territories. The Dutch maps were bordered by a series of panels with select city views, cathedral spires, old gateways and iconic vistas. The imaginary cartography of The Democratic Forest is lined with a network of highways, a complex arterial system connecting Memphis to the outer reaches. It would be bordered with panels depicting gas stations or Bar-B-Q stops. Memphis itself would be disproportionately large so you could locate each parking spot, shopping precinct, restaurant or store. The core of this work originates from the daily round, the running of errands, the negotiation of traffic signals, and a world often viewed through a windscreen. Out of this he has made a monument. From a point settled at home beside his reel-to-reel tape recorder or from the chair on the front porch, he strode out with a case of cameras, seemingly undaunted by the possibility that everything that crossed his view was a worthy subject if he could apply the language with which to contain it. 

The division of the publication into ten volumes is an editorial construction. Eggleston never conceived of more than a sea of pictures. They were piled on the piano or dining room table and lav in stacks around his Memphis home. He dwelt in the photographs, not in their separation into distinct volumes. The work was grouped around the passages through specific locations. The set of volumes as a whole has a beginning and an end. Each volume then has its particular opening and ending. The first book, drawn from The Louisiana Project, serves as an overture. It exists au tonomously and was photographed on a larger format, but it leads us into The Democratic Forest by establishing a landscape. Here the plantation house is crumbling and the riverbed is lined with trash. He photographs a wall of smashed glass as elegantly as he does a lace curtain. He takes us to a white cascade of cotton and the waters of the Mississippi. He forces us to readjust our view. The second volume seeks to define the language in the most explicit manner. The precision of Eggleston's framing leaves no imbalance. There is nothing remotely casual about these pictures. If he shows us the corner of the tail of a car, it is evident that he is placing that fragment of colour in a greater rectangular scheme. The automobile is omnipresent. The lines on the road or the border of the curb provide a painted geometry. The skies are strewn with cables. The verticals are enforced with masts and the trees that counter the linear artifice with an abundance of foliage. The geographical progression begins with the third volume. We arrive in Dallas. Here his choice of an old lens for his Leica provides a diffuse light that glows in the reflecting surfaces of the new city. It is a scene of construction and high-rise, glittering in its power, and then a simple corner of the book depository bears the sign in reference to the event of November 1963. This note of the assassination is caught as a detail in the centre of the frame. From the architecture of corporate power we are drawn to the claustrophobic spaces of the oilrigs, where human form is enveloped. Amidst the mud and the grunge Eggleston uncovered the grids of pipework and the reds of industrial plant. From the trail of pipes we turn to the trunks of palms along a tropical coast and then into the foliage around the pale colours of Art Deco Miami. After the lush and tended gardens of Villa Viscaya, a touch of the Veneto on the Florida shore, we encounter the rampant foliage of the swamp and catch the abandoned vehicles in the undergrowth Pittsburgh must have been overwhelming. You sense Eggleston at a point of full flow. He is walking the streets in a mood of incessant discovery. The thrust of the new city is set against the vestiges of its foundations, built on the vast rock of industrial America. You see the old world in the mass of the stonework and the iron structures of the bridges. When Gene Smith arrived in Pittsburgh more than twenty years before, the manufacturing muscle was still present. The drama of industrial production was so prolific and the life of the city so engaging, Smith remained for many months. Eggleston is wandering on sidewalks where the streetcars are still running, but they are relics. The city of steel is tainted with rust. There is an overriding sense that the buildings of the old world have been cleared to create the empty spaces with high adjacent walls - the ubiq- uitous parking lots.

In Berlin the past was inescapable. The bullet holes still marked the old façade. The Wall, stretching like a giant screen, and the tattered brickwork on the boundary with the East, provided the surfaces on which the slogans were scrawled. In the new city the trees sprouted beside the concrete of the apartment blocks. Eggleston found a palette of synthetic colour. The nocturnal city was strung with neon, punctuating the black background with dots of electric light. Here the forest' reached its border. A photograph of the line of the Wall is followed by the high fence of Elvis' Graceland, a monument to Memphis' proudest star, returning the viewer once again to the centre of the map.

The pastoral departure of the sixth volume allows us to breathe. The open pastures turn to unabashed floral arrangements. The eye that enabled us to see the lyricism in the detritus of the cluttered world, then throws you to the edge of a postcard view as you catch a Tennessee hilltop in the evening light or the English rose before weathered medieval stone. You follow a country ride through the Kentucky tobacco fields. The horses find shade beneath the spread of branches. The forest is lush and everything is cast in the light of wellbeing. The passage prods the memory. The interior world of the subsequent volume takes us further into a half-remembered past among the attic rooms and old suitcases. The prints of the photographs themselves spill across the frame. Eggleston's interiors correspond to the opening of an old trunk containing the residue of an earlier life, where scenes as austere as a bathroom wall turn into the luxuriant surface of a Venetian villa. He then startles us with a revelation in red by the kitchen sink or the perfect arrangement of the salt and pepper in the centre of a chequered tabletop. The ethereal dreamlike evocation is brought down to earth with the plainest domesticity.

By the time you reach the eighth volume, The Surface, you will have fully entered the forest. The flattened plane finally renders even the sky, with its Tiepolo pinks and blues, as a celestial surface or dome of heaven. The ninth volume employs all the elements of the preceding books in a passage spreading from the vertical proliferation of the masts, past the accumulated verbosity of the signs, to the full arboreal presence. The cars are discreetly parked beneath canopies of branches. The Finale leads us back through the small towns, along Main Street and past the square and then further down the trail into the depths of the cotton country. Here we catch sight of an earlier America, a grand pedimented façade, historic walls, and the home of Andrew Jackson, the President from Tennessee whose followers created the Democratic Party and after whom the decades from 1830 to 1850 were known as the years of Jacksonian democracy. It is a short step from Jackson's death in Nashville in 1845 to Shiloh in 1862. In Eggleston's photograph the waters of the lake at the battlefield are stained red in the late light. For all its modernity and radical invention The Democratic Forest is grounded in history - a history of loss.

That The Democratic Forest emerges fully is cause for celebration. Regardless of what praise has been accrued for Eggleston, that this, of all his work, has taken thirty years to be presented is unfortunate. That his influence has been so widespread is testimony to his originality, but it remains a grievous oversight that in his lifetime this masterful epic has, until now, lurked unseen - too vast to comprehend and too easy to ignore.