The retrospective William Eggleston: Democratic Camera, Photographs and Video, 1961–2008 is now up at the Art Institute of Chicago in their new modern wing. This exhibition highlights William Eggleston's ubiquitous images as well as his lesser known black-and-white work from the 1960s and other series that are rarely exhibited. A pioneer whose work helped break color photography into museums and galleries in the 1970s, Eggleston focuses on the everyday familiar in undeniably vivid color.
As a student of photographic preservation, I understand color photography to be extremely unstable, particularly color work that was created in the 1960s and 1970s when film and paper manufacturers, as well as photographers both professional and amateur, were still unaware of the inherent and dramatic fading and color shifting of their products. So I was pleasantly surprised to see Eggleston's vintage prints displayed with brilliant color. Either by extreme foresight, good luck, or a keen insight into collectors of art, Eggleston chose to work in the dye imbibition (or dye transfer) process which offers greater control in color saturation, brightness and hue. The pure dyes of this process are tremendously stable and preserve the artists' original printing choices. For effective comparison, some of Eggleston's images that were printed as 5 x 7s with the standard chromogenic process were displayed near large dye transfer prints from the same negatives. The color comparison is dramatic and the stability of dye transfer unmistakable.
On the same note, there are a few digital prints in this show. Much is made of the stability of the various digital printing processes and I only hope that twenty years from now the process chosen for those prints proves just as stable as Eggleston's dye transfers.
Printing processes aside, I love Eggleston's work and this exhibition. His explorations of the most common scenes around him transform the mundane into strange, unexpected and vividly American photographs.
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