Pictured: William Eggleston: Untitled from The Democratic Forest, c. 1983-1986. © Eggleston Artistic Trust. Courtesy David Zwirner, New York/London.
Over the summer David Zwirner made waves by luring William Eggleston—one of the first photographers to show color prints at New York’s Museum of Modern Art and a pioneer of the medium—away from Gagosian. A few months later, Zwirner has filled the ground floor of its 20th Street gallery with forty-two untitled prints—the largest of which are about 45 by 65 inches—from the artist’s expansive series “The Democratic Forest.” In the mid-1980s, Eggleston traveled around rural, residential, and industrial areas of the southern and eastern United States, and well as Europe, producing images of a phone handset resting ominously on an embroidered bedsheet, a child in overalls poring over a gun catalogue, and what looks like a vacant outdoor snack shack, among others. These scenes would be overlooked if not for Eggleston’s beguiling ability to perfectly frame and capture an environment’s color, geometry, and light. —Leigh Anne Miller
Pictured: William Eggleston: Untitled from “The Democratic Forest,” c. 1983-1986. © Eggleston Artistic Trust. Courtesy David Zwirner, New York/London.