William Eggleston: The Last Dyes

This momentous publication catalogues the last major group of William Eggleston's photographs to ever be produced using the dye-transfer method, the format in which he originally presented his work. Eggleston's vivid photographs transform the ordinary into distinctive, poetic images that eschew fixed meaning. One of the foremost practitioners in the medium's history, Eggleston is widely considered the father of color photography. He pioneered the use of dye-transfer printing for art photography in the 1970s. The technically advanced process-first developed by Kodak in the 1940s-allowed him to achieve the richness of tonal depth and color saturation that he had been searching for. In the early 1990s, Kodak stopped producing the dyes, paper, and film used in the process. With the necessary materials now discontinued, and the bulk of what remained being used for the major group of work presented at David Zwirner in Los Angeles, The Last Dyes marks the final presentation of new works completed in this medium. The publication includes a new essay by Jeffrey Kastner, offering critical insights into Eggleston's enduring influence at this turning point in the history of photography.

Over the course of nearly six decades, William Eggleston (b. 1939) has established a singular pictorial style that deftly combines vernacular subject matter with an innate and sophisticated understanding of color, form, and composition. His 1976 solo exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, curated by John Szarkowski, marked one of the first presentations of color photography at the museum. Although initially criticized for its unfamiliar approach, the show and its accompanying catalogue, William Eggleston's Guide, heralded an important moment in the medium's acceptance within the art-historical canon, and it solidified the artist's position as one of its foremost practitioners to this date. Eggleston's work continues to exert an influence on contemporary visual culture at large. Eggleston was born in Memphis, Tennessee, where he continues to live today. Jeffrey Kastner is a New York-based writer and critic, the senior editor of Cabinet magazine, and a contributing editor of Places. His books include the edited volumes Land and Environmental Art and Nature (1998), and he is coauthor, with Claire Lehmann, of Artists Who Make Books (2017). His writing on contemporary art and cultural issues has appeared in such publications as Artforum, The Economist, Frieze, The New Republic, and The New York Times, and his monographic essays have been published in books and exhibition catalogues on artists including Doug Aitken, David Altmejd, Michaël Borremans, Nina Katchadourian, Ragnar Kjartansson, Tomas Saraceno, and Sarah Sze. He most recently contributed to the catalogue Robert Ryman: Early and Late (2023).