‘[The Red Ceiling] was like a Bach exercise for me because I knew that red was the most difficult colour to work with. A little red is usually enough, but to work with an entire red surface was a challenge. It was hard to do. I don’t know of any totally red pictures, except in advertising. The photograph is still powerful. It shocks you every t.mes .’
Greenwood, Mississippi (The Red Ceiling) and Memphis (Tricycle) (lot 31) are inarguably the most iconic and sought-after images from William Eggleston’s decades-long chronicle of his native south. Awash in supersaturated reds, Greenwood, Mississippi (The Red Ceiling) exemplifies Eggleston’s groundbreaking work with the dye-transfer color process. It has been illustrated extensively in literature related not only to William Eggleston but also the history of color photography. Further, references to this image have been used repeatedly in other media, such as music and film. The image has thus become known colloquially as The Red Ceiling.
Eggleston had been working with color film since the mid-1960s, primarily printing his images with commercial chromogenic methods. He soon became disappointed in the print quality and by 1972 he started to utilize the dynamic dye-transfer process. Developed by Kodak in the 1940s, dye-transfer (also known as dye imbibition) had, until that point, been used almost exclusively in the field of graphic arts, aside from a handful of photographers who had been enticed by its capabilities to produce saturated, opaque, and stable prints. The process uses 3 color separations - magenta, yellow, and cyan - that are printed individually, which allows for careful layering and control of color. Like the earlier color carbro process, dye-transfer printing was expensive and t.mes consuming. No one could argue that the results were optically stunning, but critics and museum-goers questioned whether the subjects Eggleston chose were deserving of such attention; in fact, his first major exhibition, held at The Museum of Modern Art in 1976, was widely panned.
Eggleston’s photographs, primarily taken in the Mississippi delta region, are startling in their impact, despite subject matter that may be perceived as banal. Some of the most arresting images feature Eggleston’s friends and family, including a man named T. C. Boring, a close friend who lived in Greenwood, Mississippi.
Boring was a free spirit; he preferred to be nude in his home and hosted frequent parties. Several rooms were painted entirely in one color so that the space had a hallucinatory effect. The Red Ceiling was taken while Eggleston was lying on Boring’s queen bed, which practically took up the entire room. A bare lightbulb hangs from the ceiling, with its white wires radiating outward like spokes on a wheel. One wire leads to a blacklight used to illuminate a poster that illustrates sexual positions corresponding to the zodiac. The claustrophobic feeling is heightened by the fact that the window panes at the left side of the image are also painted over.
The dye-transfer process lends itself to rich saturation. In the present image, the result is an intense, electric red that feels almost threatening in its vibrancy. Eggleston’s most powerful images from this period utilize strong compositional elements combined with color to deliver a psychological impact.
‘In the photograph of the ceiling, for example, which skews your vision unusually upward in the room, as if you were seeing with the eye of a fly drawn to the swelling lightbulb, the field of red has an emotional weight – it is as though the ceiling were bleeding. Here, color reinforces the visual structure’s reference to the Confederate flag – metaphorically a field of blood.’
Many writers have drawn parallels between the strong diagonals and color used in The Red Ceiling and the Confederate flag. Eggleston himself admitted to curator John Szarkowski that he based the composition on the flag. Highly visible in the American south in the 1960s and 1970s, the Confederate flag was a graphically arresting image featured literally and symbolically throughout Eggleston’s oeuvre. His interpretation of the flag is two-part: not only does he compose his images with elements that radiate outward from a circular core, but he also photographs objects of crimson red with white linear elements slicing across the field of color.
Dye-transfer prints of Greenwood, Mississippi (The Red Ceiling) rarely appear at auction. Prints are in the collects
ions of the Victoria & Albert Museum, London; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D. C.; the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City; the Philadelphia Museum of Artl and the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art.
The Dye Transfer Printing Process, as shown by Eliot Porter
