William Eggleston, Untitled, 1970. © Eggleston Artistic Trust. Courtesy Eggleston Artistic Trust and David Zwirner
William Eggleston was born in Memphis, Tennessee, where he still lives today. This exhibition marks the artist’s sixth solo presentation with David Zwirner since joining the gallery in 2016. Since the 1970s, Eggleston’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at prominent institutions worldwide, such as the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC and the Barbican Gallery, London.
David Zwirner is pleased to present The Last Dyes, an exhibition of new dye-transfer prints by William Eggleston opening at the gallery’s 606 N Western Avenue location in Los Angeles. Eggleston pioneered the use of dye-transfer printing for art photography in the 1970s, and—as the title suggests—these photographs will be the final prints ever made of Eggleston’s images using this inimitable analog process. The presentation itself constitutes one of the last major groups of photographs ever to be produced using this printing method, making it a unique opportunity to see several works by “the godfather of color photography” in the format in which he originally presented them.
The works on view are from Eggleston’s celebrated Outlands and Chromes series, as well as several images that were first shown in the artist’s groundbreaking exhibition of color photography at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1976, and the concurrent publication William Eggleston’s Guide. Eggleston, in consultation with his sons William and Winston, chose this group of images for his final dyes as a representative selection of the immense photographic project he undertook between 1969 and 1974 during his travels through the American South.
In 1972, Eggleston discovered the dye-transfer process that allowed him to achieve the richness of tonal depth and color saturation that he had been searching for. Developed by Kodak in the 1940s, the dye-transfer process and materials were primarily used for fashion photography and commercial use. More akin to offset printing, the dye-transfer process is a technically advanced undertaking done by hand in which the original image (Eggleston primarily used Kodachrome slide film) is split into three separation negatives that are then enlarged onto three film matrices—a transparent cell coated with a light-sensitive emulsion—as positive images. Each of the three film matrices is immersed in a dye bath of cyan, magenta, and yellow, respectively, with the gelatin on the matrices holding the dye. One at a time, the individual matrices are pressed and rolled onto a special fiber paper that is highly receptive to the dyes, resulting in the final color photograph.
The show runs from November 16, 2024–February 1, 2025 at 606 N Western Avenue, Los Angeles. For further information on the exhibition, please visit the gallery website.
William Eggleston, Untitled, 1970. © Eggleston Artistic Trust. Courtesy Eggleston Artistic Trust and David Zwirner
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