"Much ado About Nothing"

Curatorial Review of Last Dyes at David Zwirmer

At a glance, the vibrant, chromatic work in “Last Dyes” by William Eggleston, currently on view at David Zwirner LA, evokes a nostalgic and melancholic era of ephemeral American life in the late 1960s through the 1970s. Through technique and form, the work constructs a cohesive argument for American Southern culture, filtered through the lens of a white-dominated narrative of the era. Yet, upon closer inspection, it reveals the fragility of this cultural identity and the constructs of normalcy in a shifting world. Cataloging consumerism, race relations, and technological advancements. Eggleston’s work parallels advertising in its ability to package and sell an idealized vision of America. Just as Coke cans and Campbell’s Soup became icons of consumer culture—embedding comfort, familiarity, and identity into marketable products—Eggleston’s images commodify the mundane South. The technicolor depictions of a freezer stocked with TV dinners, forgotten objects, and solitary figures suggest a celebration and critique of the American Dream. Often regarded as mundane or insignificant, these scenes have the same aspirational ethos as midcentury marketing through color, tone, and technique.

While viewing the technicolor scenes, one must question: Who are these images for? When visiting the exhibition, I overheard a Black photographer remark, “It’s amazing how white photographers have the privilege to photograph nothing and have it be regarded as something.” This sentiment underscores the cultural privilege embedded within Eggleston’s oeuvre. Whiteness often operates invisibly, allowing Eggleston to be celebrated simply as an “American Photographer” rather than a “white American Photographer.” Yet his work is coated in whiteness, from subject matter to perspective, which creates questions of privilege, nostalgia, and cultural dominance, even if inadvertently. These images resonate emotionally with the alienation of consumer culture, much as biblical imagery resonated with ideological struggles in 16th-century Europe. However, this alienation is not universal; it is contextual and rooted in Eggleston’s vantage point.

Further examining the subject matter, Eggleston himself described life on his family's plantation as 'extremely lonesome,' mirroring the solitude and ennui captured in his images of empty parking lots and quiet suburban streets. This only becomes more resonant with viewers of every background as globalization, the internet, and most forms of entertainment tie aspiration with grandeur in this iteration of consumerism. Depictions of white individuals are framed in isolating silhouettes, where their environment serves as both a boundary and a defining characteristic, emphasizing their alienation from the world around them. Objects in Eggleston's compositions create a syntax that imbues imagery with the baroque qualities of chiaroscuro and the lived-in texture of Caravaggio. Compositions resonate emotionally with the alienation of consumer culture, much as biblical imagery resonated with ideological struggles in 16th-century Europe. In contrast, when Black subjects enter the frame, their expressions often convey a sense of questioning, yielding a dynamic opposition to their white counterparts. It is as if Eggleston happens upon them, and it becomes evident they are observers within the space alongside him but not central to the narrative as only two photos including Black Subjects in the exhibition. Their presence exudes a sense of engagement with the world but is often photographed with others, this juxtaposition challenges the ennui that dominates his depictions of whiteness but also brings to question how his framing reinforces or disrupts power dynamics.

The compositions retain a stoic, post-structuralist disposition, unintentionally aligning with Roland Barthes’ assertion that a photograph serves as a pure trace, stamping what is real. Eggleston’s work acts as a regional, personalized journal that accidentally records race, class, and the subtle transformation of the mundane to a commercialized space. Liminal spaces such as Parking lots, dinner tables, and convenience stores are documented with the same tools as advertisers but with the posture of a beat poet—concise, succinct, and immediate. Eggleston authorizes and, in a way, validates a new iteration of straight Anglo-American culture. Contrasting the expectations of grandeur in American art and advertisement before the late 20th century, where pride and conquest are evident in the work of Ansel Adams. As celebrated sought to document landscapes in a manner reminiscent of colonial realism, individuals through valor. Eggleston’s work functions as character studies rather than ownership surveys, utilizing surroundings and structures to build profiles of status and value amid the developing middle class and the rapidly changing South.

The use of Kodachrome, with its “vivid, almost painfully real colors” (Sontag), anchors these works in the ephemera of the era as it is a now-discontinued Kodak color film originally developed in 1935. Kodachrome gained popularity in marketing spheres as technicolor became prevalent throughout the 1960s and 1970s. In its elaborate development process, which could only be performed in specialized Kodachrome labs Magenta, cyan, and yellow dyes were added during development to correspond to three separate black-and-white exposures. The film was then bleached to remove any remaining silver, leaving behind durable, vibrant colors that defined an era with their unique resolution.

Eggleston’s Americano highlighted in The Last Dyes is both a product of their time and ephemeral artifacts. Snapshots of America grappling with its isolation in the wake of desegregation. The collapse of older identifiers like plantations and farms into suburbia echoes the shift in economic control by aristocratic Southerners. As W.J. Cash observed in The Mind of the South, “The plantation has passed into legend, leaving behind a culture defined by its ghosts and shadows.” Empty parking lots drenched in monochrome blue light, deserted dinner tables, and the few instances of community found in cars and churches reflect this decline and the subsequent descent into hypercapitalism and expansion. Eggleston, the son of a judge and engineer, acts as an "aristocratic voyeur" (Szarkowski, William Eggleston's Guide), documenting the middle-class South on the brink of transformation. This distortion of class divides makes Eggleston's work compelling, emphasizing his gaze as equally important as the subject itself. As Susan Sontag remarked in On Photography, "To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge—and, therefore, like power." Eggleston’s work functions as character studies and ownership surveys, utilizing surroundings and structures to build profiles of status and value. In a time when art increasingly served consumerist ends, his images offered a space elevating the mundane while subtly, unintentionally ascribing a new value to “nothing”. Eggleston, who grew up on a plantation in its decline, finds another path to ownership of the world that surrounds him, inserting it into the technicolor glamour that has replaced Southern Aristocratic society since the time of the Antebellum period.