His camera, held at weed level, shows us weeds close-to, shoving up their saw-toothed leaves through a crack in the pavement and, at a distance back in the same frame, Atlanta’s skyscrapers on the rise too, proliferating and more rampant than weeds. Skyscrapers rear up like bullies planning to overrun the city, or running the city, from on high.
William Eggleston's Untitled, Miami, Florida
He moves about the skylines of Miami, Atlanta, Pittsburgh. No last drop of humanity could come from what we’ve built as fortifications. He tests it with a view of the Texas State Book Depository in Dallas, indelible in the world’s memory as the source of the gunshots that killed President John F. Kennedy.
Eudora Welty’s introduction to William Eggleston’s The Democratic Forest (1989)
