Untitled, c. 1971-1974

A mesmerizing example of William Eggleston’s unique observations of simple beauty found amongst the commonplace, the image Untitled, 1971-1974 comes from the artist’s Los Alamos series. This celebrated series documents the artist’s wanderings and discoveries during road trips throughout the American South—the artist’s birthplace and home—taken with writer and curator Walter Hopps between 1965 and 1974.

The images made by Eggleston during the trip were set aside at the time and then rediscovered nearly 40 years later, published and exhibited for the first time in 2003. According to legend, when Eggleston and Hopps passed by the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico in 1973, Eggleston smiled and said, ‘You know, I’d like to have a secret lab like that myself’.

Considered one of the foremost American photographers of his generation, Eggleston’s work has influenced generations of image makers around the globe. His solo exhibition of color photographs at the Museum of Modern Art in 1976—and the accompanying catalogue referred to as his ‘Guide’—was a turning point in the medium’s history for several reasons. First and foremost, color photographs simply were not in the realm of art; the visual language of black-and-white photographs had long been accepted as not only the preferred style but the only truly acceptable form for a serious art photograph. The work of Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Weston and Ansel Adams in the first half of the twentieth century was proof enough. Likewise, serious Guggenheim Fellows like Robert Frank or Lee Friedlander photographed almost exclusively in black and white.

Color was the domain of birthday parties and graduations, of snapshots made in front of monuments, and of weddings and pictures of pets. They were the domain of slick advertising pics and vernacular family photo albums. Eggleston’s photographic output was not only in color, but it also seemed to be of the stuff of everyday life—a lightbulb in the ceiling, a child’s tricycle, someone walking down a gravel road, a view of a drink and the window of an airplane.

There were no views of the Grand Tetons in Wyoming, or of a sensual female nude figure study, the stuff of ‘serious art photography.’ This vision was radical, misunderstood and completely unexpected. John Szarkowski, the newly appointed head of the Photographs Department at MoMA, had inherited a carefully cultivated, if somewhat limited, vision of photography from his two predecessors, Beaumont Newhall and Edward Steichen, and knew that Eggleston’s work would leave its mark both for the artist and for him.

The images were either dismissed by contemporary critics or reviled for their apparent meaninglessness. Szarkowski, however, was a tenacious defender, writing that: ‘If Eggleston’s perspective is essentially romantic, however, the romanticism is different in spirit and aspect from that with which we are familiar in the photography of the past generation. In that more familiar mode, photographic romanticism has tended to mean the adoption and adaptation of large public issues, social or philosophical, for private artistic ends … In Eggleston’s work these characteristics are reversed, and we see uncompromisingly private experience described in a manner that is restrained, austere, and public…’ (J. Szarkowski, William Eggleston’s Guide, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1976, p. 11).

This impressively large print of the image was first sold in the Christie’s salerooms in 2012 as part of a landmark auction during which 36 key images from the photographer’s archive were chosen by Eggleston himself to be produced as oversized pigment prints, in a very limited edition of two. Of those two prints, only one work was released for sale.

For decades, Eggleston’s color work had been produced using a highly stable commercial printing technique called ‘dye transfer process.’ Yielding saturated colors at chemically stable, the dye transfer process had one major limitation: scale. In the early years of the 21st century, developments in printing processes had evolved rapidly, and the ability to produce satisfying results in color that were likewise chemically stable, unlike the large chromogenic prints (C-Prints) of the 80s and 90s, enthralled Eggleston, who undertook a re-examination of his own archive to choose the works presented in the 2012 auction.

Using his characteristically accessible visual language, Untitled, 1971-1974 evokes the sensation where calmness and exhilaration intersect during air travel. In addition to the image’s distinctive romanticism, it also evokes a nostalgia for a more elegant and comfortable aviation experience of the past. The image has been exalted since its first appearance for its both resplendent and raw poeticism of colloquial imagery.