The tight composition of William Eggleston’s (b.1939) Untitled captures a dilapidated dairy bar on the side of the street in Memphis, Tennessee. With the classic American muscle car parked on the right hand side, Untitled is suggestive of an ambiguous, yet somewhat sinister, narrative.

Untitled is part of Eggleston’s series Chromes (1970-73), which revolves around his early experimentation with colour and composition. It was around this time, primarily from 1972, that Eggleston began to use his now iconic ‘dye transfer’ process. Previously only used for advertising and magazine copy, ‘dye transfer’ separates out colours in the printing process to create deep, long lasting tones, clearly visible in the saturated blues and reds of Untitled. Eggleston’s use of colour marked a radical new step in the development of fine art photography, which was previously dominated exclusively by black and white imagery.