Los Alamos

During a Jack Kerouac-inspired road trip that lasted nine years, the photographer William Eggleston documented working-class towns, rest stop diners, dilapidated gas stations, and barren stretches of land in the American South and Southwest. For thirty years following Eggleston’s trip, the images sat in a warehouse as he focused on other work, many of them unseen. In 2002, Eggleston’s journey finally reached its destination when the resurfaced snapshots were published as “Los Alamos,” a series of 75 dye-transfer prints from color negatives he captured along his journey between 1965 and 1974—among the artist’s first work in color film. The series takes its name from the Los Alamos nuclear fission laboratory in New Mexico, where atomic bombs were developed during World War II. As legend goes, when Eggleston and his friend Walter Hopps were driving past the laboratory in 1973, Eggleston remarked, “You know, I’d like to have a secret lab like that myself.”