William Eggleston: The Last Dyes exhibition in L.A.

Alex Benjamin

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At David Zwirner's gallery in Los Angeles:

William Eggleston: The Last Dyes | Los Angeles | November 16, 2024—February 1, 2025 | David Zwirner

David Zwirner is pleased to present The Last Dyes, an exhibition of new dye-transfer prints by William Eggleston opening at the gallery’s 606 N Western Avenue location in Los Angeles.
www.davidzwirner.com

From the website:

David Zwirner is pleased to present The Last Dyes, an exhibition of new dye-transfer prints by William Eggleston opening at the gallery’s 606 N Western Avenue location in Los Angeles. Eggleston pioneered the use of dye-transfer printing for art photography in the 1970s, and—as the title suggests—these photographs will be 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. The works on view are from Eggleston’s celebrated Outlands and Chromes series, as well as several images that were first shown in the artist’s groundbreaking exhibition of color photography at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1976, and the concurrent publication William Eggleston’s Guide. William Eggleston: The Last Dyes is presented as part of PST ART: Art & Science Collide, a landmark regional event exploring the intersections of art and science, both past and present. PST ART is presented by Getty.
 

Sirius Glass

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Thank you for posting this. It is nearby me.
 

cliveh

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I like the first carpark image, but am not impressed by the others.
 

Ben 4

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Pieter12 said:
Please. There are many better restaurants in the area. And closer to the gallery, too.
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Any recommendations? I no longer live in LA but grew up eating there—a family favorite back in the day (and still try to get there when I visit).
 

DREW WILEY

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Eggleston did NOT pioneer the use of Dye Transfer printing as an art medium - not even close, by decades. He didn't even print his own work. BUT the dye transfer medium did present his imagery at its best. We're down to probably the last generation of it, at least commercially; most of it is now being done in Germany.

I really disliked it when venues started showing his work large and in inkjet. The shoe just didn't fit. All the charm and intrigue got lost. So this sounds like a good opportunity for those who haven't seen the true character of his earlier work yet.
 

logan2z

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DREW WILEY said:
I don't know if the exhibition under discussion was recently printed in Germany or not, or is an assemblage earlier printings.
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Watch the video I posted above. The prints were made by Guy Stricherz in Washington State.
 
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DREW WILEY

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Yes. Thank you. I already noted that. There are a handful of people still printing for others in this country. There are also several updated hybrid methods of DT, which simplify the color separation steps, with most of it now being done in Germany. I never found the time to master the process myself, but did learn the basics and still have quite a few supplies. DT was the routine method of high quality color printing clear up until the Cibachrome era, which was simpler, but had its own idiosyncrasies. In other words, the 70's were the end of the DT heyday, not the beginning.

Another clarification - the official Kodak Dye Transfer process was merely a more rapid tanning development tweak to the previous Eastman wash-relief process (which I personally prefer because it's easier to control, and which held its own among certain commercial printing houses clear up till the end). So, for all practical purposes, 1946 was not the beginning. But exactly how far back this goes is something hard to pin down.

Six different corporations once supplied the necessary materials. Then Kodak themselves became undependable. But a couple of large custom runs of matrix film were subsequently done in Europe. That could be done again if there was enough interest to fund it. Dyes themselves are readily obtainable. Dye choice had to factor several variables, including ease of retouching. The traditional Eastman Kodak dye sets didn't do well on display if there was UV involved. They were at least better than the chromogenic prints of that era,
in that respect, but not up to par with today's highly improved Fuji Crystal Archive prints, for example, nor with Cibachromes. Eggleston's statement that they are not fugitive is both relative and exaggerated. They can hold up well under controlled dark storage conditions.

Web images of Eggleston's work are barbaric by comparison. Every color photographer should see some real dye transfer prints before crowing about inkjet or whatever. Of course, lots and lots of lousy DT prints were made over the decades too. It was marketed to home darkroom printers as well, and even advertised for its ease (it was easy compared to previous color carbro printing, but still highly complex compared to today's norms of color printing).

Thanks for sharing this with us, Alex, and Logan too.
 
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warden

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DREW WILEY said:
Eggleston did NOT pioneer the use of Dye Transfer printing as an art medium - not even close, by decades.
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Eggleston was having his work dye transfer printed and hung at MoMA in the 1970s. Were there other photographers exhibiting dye transfers in museums back in the 1950’s?
DREW WILEY said:
He didn't even print his own work.
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He’s not a printer, he’s a photographer. He sure hired the best printers though!
Yeah the big ones are hard to embrace, but if you’ve seen the big ones you’ve probably seen the dye transfers too as they’re usually shown together, at least when I’ve seen them.
 

DREW WILEY

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Long before the 50's, Warden. Even Szarkowski himself, who introduced Eggleston to the public, had already championed color photographers like Ernst Haas and Eliot Porter. Porter's recognition went clear back to the Stiegliz era. Then he served as a machinist in WWII, and that experience allowed him to make his own DT printing gear. Later he hired darkroom assistants in that endeavor. Porter was just one among many photographers who did do their own dye transfer printing. Others farmed it out instead, generally to big labs which did dye transfer on an assembly line basis, using a quantity of technicians each specializing in a different task. But there have also been a number of "hired gun" small shops willing to work with very select photographer clients relative to their print needs. Most of those have now run out of their stockpiles of the necessary materials.

Here on the West Coast, Richard Kaufmann was an example of an expert photographer-Carbro printer who not only successfully transitioned to dye transfer, but even mastered his own printing plates for sake of his famous coffee table books.

I was starting down that road, but then figured out how to attain surprisingly compelling color repro a more direct route, though still relatively complex and expensive, and still hands-on. But I have no interest in doing that commercially.
 

warden

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Forgot all about Ernst Haas. He was great.
 

ic-racer

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Thank you for the link, great stuff.

Personally my life long goal has been to creat B&W prints that can stand up to this kind of color work.
 

DREW WILEY

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Really good DT prints are actually uncommon. The success rate is way way higher with inkjet. But when someone really bags a DT, it stands out.

DT was an amazingly flexible process. But it did have inherent limitations. Even in the best of cases, there's a bit of dye bleeding; so these are not the sharpest of prints. The process favored dark values, which go on and on in terms of gradation. Getting good highlight differentiation was not its strong point. Then it required considerable care and really good equipment to maintain precise registration between all the steps. Technicolor was the moving image version of dye transfer, and watching those old movies, one detects an awful lot of haloes around subjects, or other routine forms of mis-registration, since they were assembling together strips of small 35mm frames. It potentially improves the bigger the film size is.
 

Pieter12

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Ben 4 said:
Any recommendations? I no longer live in LA but grew up eating there—a family favorite back in the day (and still try to get there when I visit).
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Versailles, on La Cienega just south of Olympic Blvd for Cuban food. Inexpensive, tasty. They're known for the chicken, I like the Lechon (pork).
Trejo's Tacos, on La Brea (also just south of Olympic). Inexpensive outdoor dining.
La Serenata De Garibaldi, on Pico just west of Westwood Blvd. More like El Cholo, good seafood.

If you happen to go to Freestyle Photo on Sunset in East Hollywood, there's Jitlada (Thai) and a little further east, Zankou Chicken (Mediterranean).

All pretty reasonable, not fancy.
 
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koraks

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ic-racer said:
Thank you for the link, great stuff.

Personally my life long goal has been to creat B&W prints that can stand up to this kind of color work.
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It's a bit of a different discussion, but to me, this reads like "I'm trying to write a string quartet that can stand up to a good pizza." Different animals, horses for courses. How do you compare a color photograph to a B&W photograph in a meaningful way, other than noting they're fundamentally different?
 

Ben 4

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Thanks! I'll look for these next time I'm in the area!
 

ic-racer

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Museums are filled with pizza and string quartets and a hundred other things. Some better than others.
 

DREW WILEY

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I just use my eyes and intuition. I have no problem with side-by-side color and black and white prints if they're thoughtfully arranged.
I've been in one of those kinds of exhibits myself. I do it on my own walls.

Once in awhile I'm tempted to visit some special museum venue. If I lived in the LA area, I'd want to see the Eggleston one under discussion. But I generally avoid them due to just more of the same predictable neo-nonsense.
 
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