© Eggleston Artistic Trust. Courtesy Eggleston Artistic Trust and David Zwirner
Anyone in love with William Eggleston’s work should book a ticket to Los Angeles now. David Zwirner is showing William Eggleston: The Last Dyes, images chosen from the immense photographic project undertaken in the American South and West between 1969 and 1974, Chromes and Outlands, as well as images from Eggleston’s 1976 groundbreaking MoMA exhibition.
William Eggleston, Untitled, 1970
© Eggleston Artistic Trust. Courtesy Eggleston Artistic Trust and David Zwirner
As the title of the exhibition suggests, these will be the final prints ever made of William Eggleston using this process which has given us Eggleston’s saturated images and his singular pictorial style over 6 decades. This group of images are shown in the format he originally presented them.
“The dye transfer technique allows William Eggleston to subjectively control color like a painter,” explained curator Thomas Weski. With this process, each color can be modified or simplified without affecting the other colors. Another advantage of the dye-transfer, colors don’t fade over time. The dye-transfer process was developed by Kodak in the 1940s. It was mainly used for commercial photography and advertising. The process is done by hand. The original image is split in 3 separation negatives. “I was reading the price list of this lab in Chicago and it advertised ‘from the cheapest to the ultimate print’,” remembered Eggleston. “The ultimate print was dye-transfer. The color saturation and the quality of the ink was overwhelming. I could not see what a plain Eggleston picture would look like with the same process.” It’s the discovery of the dye-transfer that made William Eggleston move from black & white photography to color in the 1970s.
William Eggleston, Untitled, 1972
© Eggleston Artistic Trust. Courtesy Eggleston Artistic Trust and David Zwirner
In the early 1990s, Kodak stopped producing the paper, dyes and the matrix film used in the process. Eggleston and the renowned dye-transfer specialists Guy Strichertz and Irene Malli - who have printed Eggleston’s work over the past 25 years - began acquiring the dye-transfer material available. They have used the last significant quantities of them to produce these final prints.
Born in 1939 in Memphis, where he still lives, William Eggleston came to prominence with the exhibition, Color Photographs by William Eggleston, curated by John Szarkowski, in 1976. The legendary director of MoMA’s department of photography had selected 75 images for this exhibition and written the catalogue that went with it, William Eggleston’s Guide. It was the museum’s first publication on color photography. “A new generation of young photographers has begun to use color in a confident spirit of freedom and naturalness,” wrote Szarkowski. “Color is existential and descriptive; these pictures are not photographs of color (...), but rather photographs of experience as it has been ordered and clarified within the structures imposed by the camera.” The director of the department of photography depicted Eggleston as “essentially a romantic in the Wordsworth mode.”
It is one of the last times this group of poetic and powerful photographs, from the beginnings of Eggleston to later images, will be shown. It’s well worth the price of a plane ticket.
~Jean-Sébastien Stehli
William Eggleston, Untitled, 1972
© Eggleston Artistic Trust. Courtesy Eggleston Artistic Trust and David Zwirner
William Egleston: The Last Dyes. David Zwirner 606 N Western Avenue. Los Angeles. davidzwirner.com. Until Feb.1, 2025.
