Guy Stricherz and Irene Malli are retiring. They’ve had a
great run. In 1981, Guy started the Color Vision Imaging Laboratory, in what we now call Nolita, but which was then just Little Italy, to make dye transfer prints of color photographs. An offshoot of the Technicolor film process that revolutionized the movie industry, dye transfer printing was invented in 1946; the process dominated the advertising industry and graphic arts for nearly half a century, until 1994, when Kodak discontinued making the materials for the process and sold its remaining
stock of film, paper, and dyes to master printers like Stricherz.

For the past 30 years, Stricherz has been making color dye transfer prints along with Malli, who, after graduating from Cooper Union, answered an ad for a job at the studio that Stricherz ran with another partner. She eventually married the master printer—and became one herself. They’ve done this for many photographers, but none more than William Eggleston, of whose work they have made editions of some 250
images in dye transfer. “Every print is kind of like a puzzle,” Malli said. “You have to figure out how to get from what you want to the final print.” Regarding what makes the process so special, Stricherz has said: “The dyes commingle and sort of dance to produce a bond that gives the print an almost three-dimensional
look.”

The combination of Stricherz, Malli, and Eggleston has become a thing in its own right lately. David Zwirner gallery just closed a show in Los Angeles titled William Eggleston, The Last Dyes, featuring some of Eggleston’s images using the very last of the Kodak dye transfer materials—some stockpiled by the Stricherzes, some from Eggleston’s own dwindled supply. This week, Phillips opens an exhibition of 43 lots of Eggleston’s work, signed by the photographer, for an
auction on March 18. These dye transfer prints are Stricherz and Malli’s own printer’s proofs—the apex of the artist’s intent in the hierarchy of fidelity and expression, and the reference point by which all other examples can be measured.

William Eggleston, Untitled (Peaches!) (1973).

Making dye transfer prints is a persnickety process that’s precise in the way it generates
color; it requires both the experience of a master and the approval of the artist. When working with Eggleston, the Stricherzes would create as many prints in the numbered edition as commissioned, along with a set number of artist’s proofs. They would also, by predetermined agreement, make a single printer’s proof that Eggleston would sign. Because of the process’s precision, and since the dyes do not fade in the way other printing processes do, these dye transfer prints are the perfected master
prints of Eggleston’s work. Or, as Phillips head of photography Vanessa Hallett said: “You can’t have a better print than their printer’s proof.”

Among the lots in the auction is a rare
portfolio of 75 dye transfer prints titled Los Alamos, which captures the best of Eggleston’s images from 1965-74. Los Alamos was made in an edition of seven, Hallett told me, and of those seven, two are in museums (MoMA and Museum Ludwig in Germany), three are owned by well-known collectors with commitments to institutions, and one set was broken up.
(Translation: It’s unlikely that you’ll ever get another chance to buy one.)

If that were not enough to emphasize its rarity, the portfolio is being sold as a single lot with two other portfolios of 13 photographs each, Cousins and Lost and Found, that come from negatives that Eggleston thought were lost at the time he created Los Alamos. Together, the entire lot contains 101 of Eggleston’s most famous and consequential images printed by dye transfer, and it’s
what the photographer wanted to be seen as a single body of work. Its $2 million estimate would be a record for Eggleston’s work at auction. Los Alamos (just the 75 prints) hit a then-record of just over $1 million at auction in October 2008, a terrible time for the art market; that record lasted 16 years until last November, when an oversize print (not a dye transfer) nearly 5 feet tall, of a cocktail on a plane, sold at auction for the current record of $1.4 million.

William Eggleston, Memphis (Tricycle) (1969).

In addition, the sale contains the largest dye transfer prints of Eggleston’s seven most famous
images, what he calls his “magnificent seven.” If you follow contemporary art at all, you’ll likely recognize Untitled (Peaches!), Memphis (Tricycle), or Greenwood, Mississippi (Red Ceiling) immediately. These examples are still not very large, at 17 by 26 inches. (Eggleston had much larger prints of these images made in 2012—5 feet tall or wide, depending on the orientation of the photograph—but those are made with the pigment print process on board, instead
of photographic paper.)

Mysteriously, though, this is the first time anyone outside the Eggleston orbit has seen prints in this size of the images. The cataloging says the works are from an edition of 10, plus three lettered artist’s proofs printed in 2015. Not only have these prints never been auctioned before—but until the Stricherzes decided to sell some of their printer’s proofs, Hallett had not known of their existence.

Phillips has an interesting position in the photography market. “The majority of collectors I
work with,” Hallett said, “are contemporary collectors who incorporate photographs into their collection.” Like Cindy Sherman, Andreas Gursky, and Bernd and Hilla Becher, Eggleston appeals to collectors who view his work as a new way of seeing, one that just happens to use the medium of photography.

His reputation as a photographer and artist is also bound up with the impact and acceptance of color photography as a
medium. In 1976, MoMA gave Eggleston a watershed show that changed the way the medium was viewed by artists, photographers, and collectors. After the MoMA show, photographers shed their reliance on using moody black-and-white printing to achieve the seriousness of high art. After all, MoMA had validated color.

Eggleston’s discovery of the dye transfer printing process in 1972 was integral to his success. Stricherz and Malli did not become Eggleston’s go-to dye transfer printers until
later, but once the trio met, their work became intertwined, because the married duo could realize the photographer’s vision in ways that other printers could not.

After all, in color photography, making an image is really only half of the process. The rest is all about making the print. “It’s well enough to make an excellent transparency in the studio or out in the field,” Stricherz said in a video made for the Zwirner exhibition. “But you want a print, and that is the thing.” Artists don’t exhibit transparencies, which we used to call slides; a carousel slide projector is an awkward way to view an artist’s work. “You need a physical object,” Stricherz said.

And it’s a lost art. The dye transfer process was already fading in commercial relevance when Stricherz first got involved in the early 1980s. “It’s kind of nice to be in a medium that is really—it’s not
practiced anymore,” Stricherz said. “There’s something about it being so rarefied … to do something that nobody else is doing.” Now, with the last of the Kodak materials used up, and the knowledge that Stricherz and Malli acquired over decades all but useless, it’s pretty much gone.

The secret of the dye transfer process was in the color separation. Though it frustrated many others,
Stricherz had the control to make it extremely flexible, and produce a strikingly different print from one hour to the next. Imagine the joy that Eggleston must have felt to work alongside him tweaking the colors, tones, and highlights. “You can radically change the print,” Stricherz said. “What you’re trying to do is make a print that looks as close to that transparency as can be done. And that’s really what William Eggleston wants. He wants a faithful reproduction of the transparency at full
frame.”

The European Fine Art Fair opens at the end of the week in Maastricht. The Financial
Times has a full package of stories, including a second look at the massive 2,600-piece collection of Chinese export porcelains amassed by 97-year-old architect Renato de Albuquerque and now housed in a private museum in Sintra, Portugal. There’s also an interesting look at museum donors, under the guise of the increased due diligence that museums
have to conduct on donors, after the Sackler family debacle. But that’s another story.

The FT points out that new donors have emerged, including hedgie Yan Huo, who’s now on the board of the Met, but so far has donated only $10 million. (By the way, the story all but gives up any hope that rich donors to the arts will emerge from the tech
world.) There’s also a great biography of Hilla Rebay, the first director of what is now the Guggenheim Museum. And African modernism gets a spotlight, both from a gallery that will be showing at TEFAF, but also at some important
museum shows opening at the Centre Pompidou next week and at the Tate Modern in October.

Hope this all was helpful. We’ll see you again tomorrow for the Inner
Circle. 

M