William Eggleston

William Eggleston is a household name among photography lovers — on par with Irving Penn or Nan Goldin. The reason he appears in Focus this month is practical: his exhibition The Last Dyes is on view at David Zwirner's 19th Street location in New York until March 7, 2026, and it's not to be missed.

The exhibition features new dye-transfer prints from significant series: Outlands, Chromes, and the widely celebrated William Eggleston's Guide. It offers a rare opportunity to see works by Eggleston as he originally showed them.

The title refers to the dye-transfer process and materials developed by Kodak in the 1940s. Dye-transfers are made meticulously by hand: a slide film is separated into three negatives, each enlarged onto its own matrix as a positive image. Each matrix is immersed in a dye bath of cyan, magenta, or yellow, then transferred onto special paper. The result: remarkable tonal depth and color saturation achieved through a layered, entirely manual process.

Kodak discontinued the materials for this process in the early 1990s. Recognizing the loss, Eggleston and the renowned dye-transfer specialists Guy Stricherz and Irene Malli began acquiring remaining stock. The prints at Zwirner were made using the last significant quantities. A short film on YouTube documents the process for anyone interested (link here).