William Eggleston: The Last Dyes

William Eggleston, Untitled, 1970 (detail). © Eggleston Artistic Trust

Now Open

January 15—March 7, 2026

Opening Reception

Thursday, January 15, 6–8 PM

Location

New York: 19th Street

519, 525 & 533 West 19th Street

New York, New York 10011

Thu: 6 PM-8 PM

Fri, Sat: 10 AM-6 PM

View Press Release

David Zwirner is pleased to announce The Last Dyes, an exhibition of new dye-transfer prints by William Eggleston opening at the gallery’s 533 West 19th Street location in New York. Eggleston pioneered the use of dye-transfer printing for art photography in the 1970s, and—as the title suggests—these photographs are the final prints ever made of Eggleston’s images using this analog process. The presentation itself constitutes the last major group of photographs ever to be produced using this printing method, making it a unique opportunity to see a number of works by Eggleston in the format in which he originally presented them.

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William Eggleston: The Last Dyes

“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.... The color saturation and the quality of the ink 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 ... better than the previous one.”

—William Eggleston in conversation with editor and writer Mark Holborn, 1991

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 vividly saturated photographs transform the ordinary into distinctive, poetic images that eschew fixed meaning. One of the foremost practitioners in the medium’s history, Eggleston continues to exert an influence on contemporary visual culture at large.

Behind the scenes of William Eggleston: The Last Dyes, featuring Eggleston and dye-transfer specialists Guy Stricherz and Irene Malli

William Eggleston. Photo by Langdon Clay

William Eggleston. Photo by Langdon Clay

William Eggleston. Photo by Maude Schuyler Clay

William Eggleston. Photo by Maude Schuyler Clay

William Eggleston. Photo by Winston Eggleston and William Eggleston III

William Eggleston. Photo by Winston Eggleston and William Eggleston III

William Eggleston. Photo by Stanley Booth

William Eggleston. Photo by Stanley Booth

Eggleston’s discovery of the dye-transfer process in the 1970s—primarily used in advertising at the time—was crucial to his move from primarily working in black-and-white to producing color photographs. As the exhibition title suggests, the works on view in New York are the final prints ever to be made of Eggleston’s images using this inimitable analog process.

“[The dye-transfer] technique allows William Eggleston to subjectively control colors like a painter. And this manner of interpretation contributes to the fact that you often have the feeling of consciously seeing an object for the first time.”

—Thomas Weski, curator

Interior spread, Studio Light: Presenting the Kodak Dye Transfer Process, published in August 1946

Cover of Color Separation and Masking: A Kodak Color Data Book, published in 1956

Interior spread, Kodak Dye Transfer Process: A Kodak Color Data Book, published in 1951

The dye-transfer process and materials were developed by Kodak in the 1940s, primarily 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 is split into three separation negatives. These are then enlarged onto three film matrices—transparent cells coated with a light-sensitive emulsion—as positive images.

William Eggleston at his studio in Memphis

”The complicated dynamic between what [Eggleston] was interested in and how he expressed those interests in his images would turn out to be its own kind of advertisement—for a new way of thinking about, and photographically representing, the world around us, one that would come to mark his oeuvre as among the most indelible in the history of the medium.”

—Jeffrey Kastner, William Eggleston: The Last Dyes, 2025

William Eggleston, Untitled, 1973 (detail) 

William Eggleston, Untitled, 1972 (detail)

 

“Dye transfer prints were expensive and rare.... When they did their job well they were, like Marilyn Monroe, better than anything else around.”

—Richard Benson, photographer, printer, and professor

Footage of the dye transfer process

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.

“On one level, a photograph is simply a mixture of cyan, magenta, and yellow dyes printed on paper. But the human traces Eggleston has chosen to depict in his photographs are as inescapable as the fact that that search is what makes us human.”

—Donna De Salvo, curator, Dia Art Foundation

Footage of the dye transfer process

The process requires multiple steps and the exacting alignment of each layer of dye, making it a time-consuming, labor-intensive technique that was seldom used by amateur photographers. The resulting prints are therefore quite rare, and their appearance has a physicality and built-up surface that almost resembles that of a painting. For Eggleston, the process allowed him to achieve the richness of tonal depth and color saturation that he had been searching for.

“The process of making prints, at the time crucial for color, was something that always interested Eggleston. It was not until he discovered the dye transfer process in the late sixties that he gained control over color shading, and was able to impose a palette that came to be seen as the ‘Eggleston touch.’”

—Agnès Sire, former director, Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson

An artwork by William Eggleston, called Untitled, dated 1970

William Eggleston, Untitled, 1970 (detail)

William Eggleston, Untitled, 1970 (detail)

 

In the early 1990s, Kodak stopped producing the dyes, paper, and the Matrix film used in the process. At that time, Eggleston and the renowned dye-transfer specialists Guy Stricherz and Irene Malli—who had printed Eggleston’s works for the last twenty-five years—began acquiring the remaining available dye-transfer materials, using the last significant quantities of them to produce these final photographs.

With the necessary materials now discontinued, and the bulk of what remained being used for this exhibition, The Last Dyes marks the final presentation of new works completed in this medium.

Seen together, the works on view testify to this special pairing of artist and medium, and serve as a showcase for Eggleston’s ability to visually grasp and subsequently isolate and capture the unique qualities of color and light. Balancing formal, chromatic, and compositional sophistication with poignant portrayals of these real lived worlds and the people who inhabit them, these dye-transfer prints appear as vibrant and alive today as the scenes themselves were when Eggleston photographed them some fifty years ago.

“Amidst the splintered vision of [Eggleston’s] work, there exist meticulous patterns and a discipline with which he can study flower petals or hand-guns, mansions or trash.... He continues to cut to the heart of the ordinary, probing at those things which constitute tangible dimensions, like some concrete explorer.”

—Mark Holborn, editor and writer

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