Everyone loves a secret

They dilute their experience with delay — lots of delay. I love a mystery. Dye Transfer printing was never a secret. Just because you didn’t know, maybe weren’t curious during the age of full supply and support, doesn’t mean it wasn’t there.

Is it better thinking a conspiracy kept you from learning dye transfer, than that you were lazy. How is that you are able to lecture the gathering about the insides of the process? An unlived life, so fully formed.

Some secrets are a fantasy of the person keeping themself ignorant… printing is an experience augmented by theory, not theory spiced with a bit of experience. Don’t read the bathroom wall.

Frog Prince manual: go ahead read it. You will learn a bit about “traffic” of a small commercial lab. Notice that much of the reference matters aren’t included — they are on the wall of the lab. That’s where I’d expect them to be. Mikey’s excitement is that he found a manual from a lab. In 1990, he could have had lab books by the box load. He still wouldn’t have made a print. Kissing toads isn’t the secret to knowledge.

https://www.photrio.com/forum/threads/making-commercial-color-separation-negatives-of-transparencies-for-the-kodak-dye-transfer-process.212574/

Arrogance, particularly absolute arrogance, is a rotten board in the ladder to knowledge. I was tempted to create a login and respond. Nope… this is good enough. Keep it local.

Would you join the board to inform, perhaps hoping to correct? Don’t. They will not appreciate, nor use. M. Gareleick has been under the belief that there exists a secret book, a fountainhead of all knowledge. That lacking this knowledge has kept him from making dye transfers– For some reason Kodak, and the Kabahl of commercial labs maintained these secrets to dominate the marketplace. I suppose this was meant to keep weekenders obliged to order prints from one of the Super Labs.

Ever wonder about all those dye transfer workshops held — passing out worksheets, booklets, quarterly newsletter subscriptions. It is 1980, you could learn to make matrix film… even how to use other sheet film in place of Kodak Matrix film… even for collotype.

Complicating the conspiracy: they shared it among themselves -(and)- they kept it from each other — they used it to make — better (and) worse prints than those who didn’t learn from the exclusive meeting room at Kodak Park. To get in, you had to ask. Most classes were never full.

Reads like the “worst of times, best of times…” of conspiracy novels.

I don’t believe they want to learn Dye Transfer. They want to explain why they failed to learn Dye Transfer when it was a Kodak product.

Along with the “secret knowldge” is the foundation of enlightenment…

a sidebar on inspired knowledge

The better (only) way of growing a small group is in a closed table. Open the gathering to those capable of adding more than they subtract, otherwise intensity is lost.

If You Knew Dye Transfer

How many times must a process die before you learn why? The insistence is common, consistent, durable — it lasts longer than the process itself. People of the Net hold the belief that dye transfer would be resurected, successfully, if peopls could see how fantastic it was, particularly in this age of terrible stuff.

You have to see it to believe it… You have to believe it to see it. Is that true in the case of dye transfers?

The role played by product names in art appreciation is high at the sales table, and among the foremost forums.

“Not to find one's way around a city does not mean much. But to lose one's way in a city, as one loses one's way in a forest, requires some schooling. Street names must speak to the urban wanderer like the snapping of dry twigs, and little streets in the heart of the city must reflect the times of day, for him, as clearly as a mountain valley. This art I acquired rather late in life; it fulfilled a dream, of which the first traces were labyrinths on the blotting papers in my school notebooks.”
— Walter Benjamin

understand the magic

Dyes were seen and made by hundreds in the era of Photograph as Object suited to gallery and museum. The growth years of photography in art schools — 1975 – 1995.

Even still, it failed, being superseded by other processes. Direct to print processes such as Type Rs (Cibas, too) for Slide to print. And, Type Cs (chromogenics, RA-4s)for Negative to print. This later printing mode strikes hardest, since Kodak Pan Matrix film was introduced with Kodak masked color negative film

the advantage of real world experience is that is is real.
i read history in the bathroom; philosophy in the bedroom; poetry in the kitchen

If you knew it was a dye transfer would it interest you more? One group of people have made dye imbibition prints over the past decade. Have shown them in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Houston, Brooklyn, London … never calling them Dye Transfers, instead, they were dye prints, or ink transfers, and similar names. Some prints were sold, but so too were Epson Inkjets, Fujifilm RA-4s. Without making these as dyes, they sold as images. This was the basic interest of the collective group that had gone to the trouble of learning to make dyes. By make, understand that this meant having matrix film produced again.

Why did they keep this a secret private among themselves?

what would you rather talk about: process or *c, where *c is being defined, refined. Who asks, who would you be limited to talking too, with, if the topic were “process”.

Most people diffuse their interest by a bit of gossip. That mannerism is what diminishes a process to the point of pointless conversation.

Would people dive into dye transfer if given the chance? Nope, one [J* 826 ] of the Neu Ds posted on LFPF, offering a complete working dye transfer lab, including supplies… even going so far as saying she would meet them at an upcoming conference. No one, not even the loudest of counter pounder experts on dye transfer, and all topics color.


2011: 3 students
‘12 : +3
‘15 : +8