‘The Emotional Saturation of William Eggleston’s “Last Dyes”
2026
In the 1970s, Eggleston’s pictures were called “perfectly banal.” Fifty years later, the intensity of color in his dye-transfer prints is rarified and precise. Remember that the familiar was once a stranger. In the late 1960s and early ’70s, when William Eggleston began photographing in color, he traveled to what he described as the “foreign landscapes” of the American South: the shopping centers and gas stations and treeless housing developments that had begun to crop up around Memphis, where he still lives (he is eighty-six), and along the roads in and around Mississippi, where he was born and raised. He lowered himself to the asphalt, seeming to identify with the lonesome cars parked outside solitary, identical houses. But when he stared into the kitchen freezer, he found an almost mystic portal, framed in frost, whose haphazardly stored ice trays, TV dinners, and Tater Tots made a painterly palette, a perfect harmony of form and color.