Do I owe you an answer — instruction — dye transfer lab procedures. How about gossip from the past. What are you owed.. what is your google query worth?
Since I was an experienced professional color printer, am i obliged to answer your questions?
why?
why should i have kept 40 years of files, lab notes, correspondence… you ask me to show-tell, share gossip… what qualifies you to hear the answers? what makes you think you deserve answers; my knowledge, experience, effort. People on internet forum quests take 5 years to collect answers that are included in the directions for the film. These same people bemoan the death of process and product they never used. So much for market awareness at the crowded corner.
worthwhile people have made their way… and in much less time than 20 years.
ask me a question
First, one for you: do i have to answer… after all, i ran dye transfer labs, taught college classes; even more, i made specialty equipment.. don’t i owe you answers to your lazy boy questions?
most of the always amateurs have expended great effort filling out their excuses card… more time than they ever did on the action card… gossip lacks guts.
suppose you have a choice. suppose you have an encounter between two different people
One of them has made more effort to learn than the other
One of them thinks you owe them, the other doesn’t
which of them do you want to give away a portion of your life .. that’s what teaching someone something is: giving away a part of your life.
why do I have to give up my life just to satisfy your lackadaisical approach to learning … The big secret to learning to boil eggs… don’t fear the stove. make your own errors. don’t spend your life asking others — ask the water.
repair isn’t growth
The hobby of buying repairing and selling occupies the fingers .. satisfies your contribution to commerce, but exactly how creative is that …
Potter Stewart: i’ll know it when i see it. [Potter Stewart (January 23, 1915 – December 7, 1985) was an American lawyer and judge who was an associate justice of the United States Supreme Court from 1958 to 1981.]
The last dyes are like embers from the fading analog engine. The revivalists are rushing to ride the final fashion like Lauren Lauren’s Leica slung, long lean strappy dangling from her pampered bridal shoulder. Both, she and her camera, accessorizing his success.
Dye transfer prints will decorate many a wall. Some may hang for most of the year.
THE REAL : The show — meaning from the real world. The gallery world seeming more connected to factual effort.
Dye Transfer had an early glow, mystery of process, mystique of object value. The process was time and material consuming, making it in the fuller sense something for advertising, appealing as Veblen Good to the Haute Bourgeoisie.
“I was reading the price list of this lab in Chicago and it advertised ‘from the cheapest to the ultimate print’. The ultimate print was a dye-transfer…. The color saturation and the quality of the ink was overwhelming. I couldn’t wait to see what a plain Eggleston picture would look like with the same process. Every photograph I subsequently printed with the process seemed … better than the previous one.” —William Eggleston in conversation with editor and writer Mark Holborn, 1991
:
CVI, Color Vision Imaging laboratory, Manhattan, 1981. Guy Stricherz (b. 1948) graduated from western Washington University in 1974. He went to New York city in 1977 to work for Frank Tartaro who was one of a dozen masterful printers. Even at that time the process was falling out of use. It had peaked by 1980. Irene Malli (b. 1964) graduated from Cooper Union; after graduation she worked as a printer before answering an ad for CVI in 1989. CVI was moved to Vashon Island from NYC in 2004. Some of their recent clients: Larry Burrows, Bruce Davidson, Thomas Demand, William Eggleston, Mitch Epstein, Ernst Haas, Hiro, Evelyn Hofer, Graziela Iturbide, Zoe Leonard, Arnold Newman, Irving Penn, Christopher Williams.
Frank Tartaro was another user of the idea of “tone zone” masking.
The best memory is based upon your experience. Make your own.
THE IMAGINED: Unfortunately The Last Dyes show brings out the zombie experts of the hobby forums. Killers of a process they view from sideline. The show provides opportunity to talk as tho they had a privileged seat; bring out their old bar counter stories, a chance to repeat their prejudices of process. This is the use for the brag boards.
Question the tale of the salesman. I didn’t call him on his bullshit, so you have been left with his constant crap for a decade. Mea Culpa.
They don’t learn enough because they don’t ask, they aren’t curious. They don’t do enough because they lack courage. They fear failure more than they crave doing.
The false information is imprinted onto the naive minds. False tales aren’t questions, even though he is doubted. Why trust any part of his complex tale if the beginning direction is in error. Part of his ongoing commitment to his fantasy story of his skill is due to my being so bored with him at the St. Regis meeting, I fed him his own ignorance agreeing in order to escape. No one used Tanning Bleach in a commercial practice past 1952 — the mats weren’t sharp, nor durable enough for the uses of commercial printing. There was one use of tanning bleach: schools doing Pan Matrix film– this was rare, caused by group darkroom restrictions. AND the Army never made Matrix Film; they did buy it, while after Korean War, the Department of Defense sold the surplus materials. K&L (Len Z.) bought thousands of sheets which gave him a price advantage for several years.
The Army doesn’t make sandbags nor shoelaces. Not even CCA made their materials; they did have a need for large “trans” materials which Kodak refused to make. They couldn’t. They didn’t have the ready knowledge, so CCA tried two different coaters; NG was able to make the materials using a design provided them by Robert M. of Defender.
Lasting Lie Transfers: turning sales speak into history. The story is now being told by people who didn’t even participate until the story was over eggleston show brings out stale fish stories; stolen valor from the photo fantists
“he was a machinist ” — about Eliot Porter; he wasn’t a machinist. His mode of making DTs didn’t require him to have “made his own” transfer equipment. He was a long time woodworker. He discovered the “black box” printing system. His self-made items are all wooden. No metal, no punch-pin system.
” soft image– dye bleed” — the reason Condax was brought into Kodak was because of the improvement of Tanning Development over Bleach Tanning. Two immediate improvements: sharpness of transferred image, and improved color clarity with existing dyes.
” don’t hold highlights well” — hmm, how about all those suds and softgoods ads? Or, Eggleston’s White Ceiling Fan.
a piece of the elaborate custom equipment made by Eliot Porter for his dye transfer lab.
Google has found my post from 2013, titled: The Last Dye Transfers .. coincidence a long time coming
For those considering another possible use of matrix film– think it as a mask. I did. See this patent which I’d discovered around 1961: https://patents.google.com/patent/US2371746
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