Having completed a dummy for a book with one hundred and fifty photographs drawn from the many thousands in the then unfinished project The Democratic Forest, I asked William Eggleston who he would most like to contribute an introduction. He responded without a pause. Nobody would be better than Eudora Welty. It was February 1988. We were in Memphis. Miss Eudora, herself a photographer, was the greatest Southern writer since Faulkner. She was nearly eighty years old and lived in Jackson, Mississippi, where she was born and where she was to die in 2001.

I called Miss Eudora and we were granted an appointment for a few days later. Rather than heading down the Interstate we made a point of taking Highway 61 to the heart of the Delta, pausing at sites resonant with Eggleston association, including the empty lot where the house containing the room with the red ceiling - the subject of his famous photograph - had once stood. At a motel outside Greenwood we were eating breakfast and I turned on my tape recorder, prompting Eggleston to contin- ue talking. This was not a conventional interview. Our relationship was founded on an unspoken in- formality. Though he told me about certain photographs, we seldom spoke directly about photography. Our morning conversation ended with his now much quoted statement, I am at war with the obvious'. This lucid breakfast discourse became the substance of his Afterword to the book. It is reprinted at the end of this new edition.

Miss Eudora received us and patiently proceeded through the dummy. Her comments were few but penetrating. Around two thirds of the way through she came to a photograph of a brick wall on which a single word had been daubed. Fussy? That's a strange name', she said. When I pointed out that the word began with a 'P' not an 'F', she announced she was tired, signaling the end of the session. Without reference to an agent or fees of any kind she graciously acknowledged the importance of the work and it was made clear that she would indeed provide the requested introduction. It was her gift. I can only recall that we left with the dummy. I would have forwarded her a set of crude color photocopies. About three weeks later a typewritten text arrived. Both Eggleston and myself were dazzled by it. So struck were we that we did not touch a comma. Alongside John Szarkowski's essay for William Eggleston's Guide in 1976, it was the most insightful commentary on the artist's work that I had read. Szarkowski was writing from a curatorial position at the Museum of Modern Art. He acknowledged that Eggleston's work was derived from a specific location, of which he had no expe- rience. He addressed ideas of structure and form. Appropriately Miss Eudora's new text was a fiction, which was born, like the work of her great Southern literary predecessor, Faulkner, in a deep sense of place. It was here that the ordinary acquired profundity.

I do not know if Miss Eudora relied on her memory of what she had seen in the pictures to fuel her writing, or if, in some cases, she was simply mistaken in what she saw. Re-reading her text now I real- ize how much she conflated several photographs into a description of a single picture. This early edition of the book opened in the landscape of Eggleston's family plantation. The Delta landscape is where the present definitive edition, in fact, ends. The picture on page 17 of that edition does not contain an open barn door and a sentinel tree as she describes, but the fourth picture, on page 20, does. She writes of red plastic plates at a road stop and invents a scene-of the crime story. The plates are not plastic, the place is not a road stop, and it doesn't matter. She refers with greatest elegance to a close-up of view of peonv on Boston Common. The overhanging branch does enclose the frame as if one was inside a great flower however the camera was pointed in the middle distance at a tree with a touch of the golden leafage of early fall. In her next paragraph she catalogues the contents of what she claims is a single photograph. The subjects are correctly observed, but they are the details from several photographs. The young child she notices staring back at the camera with the gravity of the homeless' is Eggleston's son, Winston. At the end of his introduction Szarkowski noted that 'A picture is after all only a picture, a con- crete kind of fiction...' Whatever was the outcome of Miss Eudora's imagination or the product of her misperception, the result reinforced the unarguable truth of such fiction.

M.H.