.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
William Eggleston is a master at phtographing banal scenes from everyday life in a way that imbues them with a quality of strangeness and mystery so they forever resonate in the viewer's mind. A chance encounter in suburbia is transformed into a haunting icon, drawing it's visual power from the formal composition and the brillance of the bold color.
Eggleston turned to the dye transfer process to attain saturation and intensity in his prints, afforded by a measure of control and permenance not found in any other color photographic process. He said that around 1973 or 1974, "I was reading the price list of this lab in Chicago and it advertised 'from the cheapest to the ultimate print'. The ultimate print was a dye-transfer. I went straight up there to look and everything I saw was commercial work like pictures of cigarette packs or perfume bottles but the color saturation and the quality of the ink (sic) was overwhelming. I couldn't wait to see what a plain Eggleston picture would look like with the same process. Every photograph I subsequently printed with the process seemed fantastic and each one seemed better than the previous one...I don't think anything has the seductivity of dyes." ( Quoted in Eggleston, Ancient and Modern, Random House, 1992, pp. 16-17)
Eggleston turned to the dye transfer process to attain saturation and intensity in his prints, afforded by a measure of control and permenance not found in any other color photographic process. He said that around 1973 or 1974, "I was reading the price list of this lab in Chicago and it advertised 'from the cheapest to the ultimate print'. The ultimate print was a dye-transfer. I went straight up there to look and everything I saw was commercial work like pictures of cigarette packs or perfume bottles but the color saturation and the quality of the ink (sic) was overwhelming. I couldn't wait to see what a plain Eggleston picture would look like with the same process. Every photograph I subsequently printed with the process seemed fantastic and each one seemed better than the previous one...I don't think anything has the seductivity of dyes." ( Quoted in Eggleston, Ancient and Modern, Random House, 1992, pp. 16-17)