On March 18, Phillips New York will present a landmark auction of William Eggleston’s photographs from the collection of Guy Stricherz and Irene Malli, the photographer’s most trusted printers. With their expertise in the dye transfer process, Stricherz and Malli played a crucial role in Eggleston’s groundbreaking exploration of color, pushing the medium to its full expressive potential.
Color Vision: Master Prints from Guy Stricherz and Irene Malli marks the first in a series of auctions from the master printers’ collection, set to unfold throughout 2025. Later sales, scheduled from June through the remainder of the year, will showcase works by other photographers who shaped the history of the medium, including Evelyn Hofer, Bruce Davidson, Thomas Demand, Zoe Leonard, Hiro and Irving Penn—all of whom Stricherz and Malli collaborated with over the years.
Leading the auction is Eggleston’s monumental portfolio Los Alamos, the definitive master set of his work from 1965 to 1974. Consisting of 101 photographs, the series embodies his relentless pursuit of color’s potential in photography. It emerged from Eggleston’s travels across the American South—his home terrain—alongside writer and curator Walter Hopps, capturing quintessential moments of life and identity in the region during that era.
When Observer reached out to Guy Stricherz and Irene Malli following the sale’s announcement, the master printers said that Los Alamos was among the most challenging projects they had ever undertaken. “For that project, Eggleston used color negative film of various types. This required us to make special separation positives. Each set of separation positives took an entire day to make and required special treatment methods.”
Notably, the portfolio offered in the sale will be the first comprehensive and complete set of the seminal series ever to come to auction. Other sets, consisting of seventy-five photographs, are held in major institutional collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and Museum Ludwig in Cologne.
Though Eggleston followed in the footsteps of American documentary photographers like Robert Frank and Walker Evans in capturing contemporary American life, he also possessed an innate ability to seize what Henri Cartier-Bresson famously described as “the decisive moment (le moment décisif).” His compositions, often centered on mundane and seemingly incidental elements, distill the essence of an entire lived experience—serendipitously aligning visual and emotional elements into a fleeting yet profound instant.
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More significantly, Eggleston was a pioneer in elevating color photography as a serious artistic medium. At a time when black-and-white photography remained the dominant standard for fine art—and color was still largely relegated to commercial or amateur use—Eggleston’s work ushered in a seismic shift. His embrace of rich saturation and tonal depth demonstrated how color could be more than a technical choice; it was a powerful artistic tool capable of evoking psychological depth and narrative complexity.
The dye transfer technique was instrumental in pushing these expressive possibilities even further. “Eggleston’s experience with dye transfer goes back more than 50 years, and he prefers a rich, vibrant and tonally deep rendering in the print that closely evokes the visual experience of what he saw in the viewfinder and the Kodachrome transparency made therein,” Stricherz and Malli said. “Using an analogy to music, the film from the camera is the score, and the print is the performance for him.”
One of the marquee lots in the sale, Magnificent Seven, is a collection of some of the largest dye transfer prints of Eggleston’s most iconic images. Among them are legendary photographs like Memphis (Tricycle) (1969), with its low-angle shot of a child’s tricycle exuding the presence of a flaming motorcycle, and Greenwood, Mississippi (Red Ceiling) (1973), a composition that posed an extreme technical challenge due to the intensity and saturation of its color. Eggleston was determined to enhance these qualities as a central expressive element in the final print, a feat only achievable through the dye transfer process—when combined with the masterful precision of Stricherz and Malli. “The photograph was like a Bach exercise for me because I knew that red was the most difficult color to work with,” Eggleston famously recalled of Greenwood, Mississippi (Red Ceiling). The two works come to auction with significant pre-sale estimates: Memphis (Tricycle) at $300,000-500,000 and Greenwood, Mississippi (Red Ceiling) at $250,000-350,000.
The timing of the sale is particularly fortuitous for Eggleston’s market, coming on the heels of his recent auction record of $1.44 million, set at Christie’s New York last November by Untitled, c. 1971-1974 (2012). The result more than doubled its low estimate and marked a 40 percent increase from the artist’s previous auction record of $1.02 million, achieved at Christie’s in 2008. Notably, the record-breaking photograph also hails from the celebrated Los Alamos series.
Further bolstering Eggleston’s momentum is recent attention from David Zwirner, which just closed a major exhibition dedicated to his dye transfer prints at its Los Angeles gallery. The show featured the last significant body of work Eggleston produced using the method, offering a rare opportunity to see these photographs as he originally intended. The exhibition served as yet another testament to the exceptionalism of these complete dye transfer sets now heading to auction at Phillips.
Contributing to the use of color in fine art photography
Stricherz and Malli built their reputation as master printers through their expertise in the dye transfer technique. “Our goal as fine art printers has always been to interpret the vision of each photographer we work with,” they said.
Their meticulous control over every stage of the printing process, from color separations to final prints, has resulted in works that are not only visually striking but also highly expressive and archivally stable. “Eggleston himself has acknowledged them as the best printers he has ever worked with—an extraordinary endorsement that underscores their expertise,” Vanessa Hallett, Phillips’ deputy chairwoman and worldwide head of photographs, told Observer.
Working alongside some of the most significant contemporary photographers, the duo pushed the dye transfer technique to new levels of color vibrancy, saturation and nuance, adapting it to each artist’s specific vision. “The vast majority of work we have printed is from color-positive transparencies,” they said. “In most cases, photographers are looking for a faithful interpretation of transparency in print form, although each photographer has a unique vision of what a faithful interpretation is for them.”
Stricherz and Malli worked closely with photographers like Eggleston throughout the printing process, ensuring that the final image precisely reflected the artist’s original vision. “When printing for a photographer, we first have a discussion with them regarding each image and how they wish the printed image to look in terms of tone and color, as well as any special treatment of local areas they may desire,” they said. “We then make a series of proof prints, and after viewing these with the photographer, a master print is chosen that becomes the standard for the edition.”
However, photography as a medium is inherently tied to its technology, evolving alongside advancements in equipment and processes—when methods become obsolete, their surviving examples become even more valuable. This is precisely the case with Eggleston’s dye transfer prints. Since Kodak ceased the manufacture of dye transfer materials in 1994, no new works in this process can ever be produced. As a result, this sale represents a rare and final opportunity to acquire Eggleston’s photographs in the format that defined his revolutionary approach to color.
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