William Eggleston's Chromatic Epiphany
David Zwirner gallery in New York presents the final dye-transfer prints ever made of William Eggleston’s photographs.
By Guénola Pellen. Photos by William Eggleston.
Between 1969 and 1974, William Eggleston wandered through the southern American territories, capturing on Kodachrome these fragments of existence that Guy Stricherz and Irene Malli transmuted according to the trichromatic arcanum of cyan, magenta, and yellow. With Kodak having discontinued film production in the early 1990s, these 45 prints exhausted the final reserves of photosensitive paper. No one will ever be able to recreate such dyes.
This chromatic depth that only dye-transfer could achieve transfigures the South skies into protagonists, their luminescence varying according to the captured hour, while below lie the withering vestiges of a vernacular civilization. Certain images, drawn from the “Outlands” and “Chromes” series, were shown during the pioneering 1976 MoMA exhibition that legitimized color photography as art.
Road signs and automobile bodies rise as blocks of stupefying saturation. This tonal richness, fruit of an artisanal process now obsolete, confers upon the manufactured objects of provincial America a quasi-hallucinatory presence. Human beings and their garments become chromatic vectors—a visual polyphony that no contemporary process could equal.
The interiors, by contrast, reveal a baroque tenebrism where shadow engenders blues and blacks of abyssal depth that only the incomparable texture of dye-transfer could manifest.
Contemplating these ultimate dyes is overwhelming. We witness, stupefied, the vestiges of an age of photography, when manual chemistry engendered a chromatic splendor forever past.
“William Eggleston: The Last Dyes” is on show at David Zwirner gallery until March 7, 2026.
