Los Alamos is the definitive collection of the work that William Eggleston executed between 1965 and 1974. The rare set of Los Alamos presented here is augmented by two additional groupings of 13 prints, each known as Cousins and Lost and Found (26 in total). This is the first time the complete and comprehensive set of Los Alamos, consisting of 101 individual dye transfer prints, has appeared at auction.  

The seminal quality of the photographs in Los Alamos cannot be overstated. They represent Eggleston’s first full exploration of the potential of color in photography. Prior to this period, Eggleston had mastered black-and-white and created a body of work that showed the influence of Henri Cartier-Bresson, Walker Evans, and Robert Frank. But he was sufficiently encouraged by recent improvements in color negative film to begin using it, first experimentally and then in earnest. By the time he made a 1973 road trip in New Mexico he was fully engaged in photographing the world in color. On that trip, made in the company of legendary gallerist and curator Walter Hopps (1932 – 2005), they stopped in view of Los Alamos National Laboratory. When Hopps told Eggleston that the facility was one of the government’s top-secret laboratories, the photographer replied, ‘You know, I’d like to have a secret lab like that myself.’ In this way, Los Alamos lent its name to this body of work, which encapsulates the unprecedented style of photography Eggleston would continue to perform and perfect. 

 “What I set out to do was produce some color pictures that were completely satisfying, that had everything, starting with composition.”

—William Eggleston

William Eggleston first gained widespread recognition for his 1976 exhibition at The Museum of Art. Photographs by William Eggleston and its accompanying book, William Eggleston’s Guide, introduced a new concept of a color photography to the public, a type of color photography unassociated with advertising or the commercial world, consonant not only with the Lyric Documentary style espoused by Walker Evans but with the saturated coloration of Pop Art.  But it is important to note that while this formally and technically-accomplished body of work marked a new direction in photography, it was preceded by the equally accomplished and much more sweeping Los Alamos project.
 

Executed over a decade, Los Alamos was a more ambitious project than the Guide. Eggleston took the photographs both on his home ground in the American South and on road trips made across the country in the late 1960s and 1970s. The 101 photographs presented in the Los Alamos portfolios were edited down from some 2,500 exposures. However, Eggleston made very few prints from the project at the time, and those that were made were chromogenic prints with which Eggleston was unsatisfied. Eggleston left the Los Alamos negatives in the care of Walter Hopps and went on to pursue other photographic projects.  Hopps kept the negatives safely for decades, until Eggleston was ready to undertake the mammoth process of editing and selecting which images to render as dye transfer prints. After Hopps’s death in 2005, more negatives from this series were discovered in his estate. This prompted a new phase of editing which ultimately resulted in the publication of the two extra portfolios offered here.

“Dye transfer is the essential medium for Eggleston’s color work.”

—Walter Hopps, curator

Los Alamos is one of the most ambitious portfolio publishing projects any photographer has embarked upon, and it could not have been realized without the printing mastery of Guy Stricherz and Irene Malli. Despite the fact that many of the materials necessary to make dye transfer prints had been discontinued, Stricherz and Malli had bought up whatever stock they could find, enabling them to create the full edition in stunning prints that met Eggleston’s exacting standards for quality. The photographer’s wish, expressed to Walter Hopps in 1973, for a ‘secret laboratory’ had come to fruition with his engagement of Stricherz and Malli as printers.  While their lab was not exactly secret, it was really only known by photographers, like Eggleston, who needed the best prints possible of their images.  

Sets of the originally issued portfolio of 75 prints are in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and Museum Ludwig, Cologne. Four sets exist in private collections. And one set was sold as individual prints. Los Alamos has appeared at auction only once before. None of the above-listed sets include the two addendum portfolios and their total of 26 additional prints, underscoring the rarity of the full set offered here.

The photographs in this sale are master prints from Guy Stricherz and Irene Malli of Color Vision Imaging Laboratory. They are the perfected dye transfer prints by which subsequent prints in the edition were judged. Acknowledged masters of the exacting dye transfer process, Mr. Stricherz and Ms. Malli achieved a level of skill in their craft that has not been surpassed. Working in partnership with William Eggleston and other eminent photographers, they have played a crucial role in raising the standard for color photography. Founded in New York City in 1981, CVI Lab became a destination for photographers looking for the finest color prints possible. Mr. Stricherz and Ms. Malli have steadily pushed the dye transfer technique forward, fine tuning the process’s many variables into a highly expressive, visually arresting, and archivally stable medium. For more information on Guy Stricherz, Irene Malli, and CVI Lab, click here.