They Need to Talk

This is a digital recreation of William Eggleston’s portrait of two 18 year-old girls that had just come home with a group of friends from the local bar that closed at 3 a.m. The photograph was taken during the summer of 1973 in Memphis Tennessee when Eggleston was about 30 years-old.
Eggleston used the dye-transfer process for the majority of his career until just recently. Kodak invented the process in the 1940s. The prints are made with four separate printing plates for the colors cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. Each plate is then pressed consecutively to a white sheet of paper that is then bathed in acids that will adhere the image layers permanently. Because each color is added separately, this process makes it very easy to manipulate specific tones and color vibrancies in desired areas of the print. It was idyllic for the saturated iconic Eggleston color photograph.
My recreation was done digitally in full manual mode, which means that I controlled the aperture, shutter speed, and focus point. The desire to learn the dye transfer printing technique could not be fulfilled due to the high cost of chemicals and the inaccessibility of the required equipment. The hue and saturation tool in the digital dark room allows for the same control of specific hues and selective color manipulation that is achieved in the dye transfer process; this was the only digital manipulation done to the image.
If you are familiar with William Eggleston’s work at all, you know that the human subject is a minority within his best-known and most commercialized work. The people that are included in the image seem to blend in at times- no greater or lesser emphasis is placed on the person than the items that share the frame with them- everything within the frame completes the composition and thought. This image seems unlike the rest in that the obvious focus is on the dialogue shown in the girls’ face and body language. The image also lends insight into the lifestyle that Eggleston led; he was happy being a local with a camera. Apparently, when this image was taken, neither girl was aware of how famous he had become. When asked about the image, Eggleston said, “The whole picture is very painting-like. It's not like most of my work. That may have been what attracted me to notice it…I knew it was a beautiful sight…The picture has the appearance that I had gone to a lot of trouble arranging it. But I didn’t’.” This honest statement answers the majority of the questions that most people ask about his choice of subject matter: he does not discriminate against color or subject.