this isn’t tuesday: 2,13 -26

beyond information ordering… a midden. I intend to find out. Bits from about the place… promising not to promise too much.

behind the scenes. I am behind in my postings. Many too many drafts.

digital enlarges beyond the page.

amateurs have more restrictions than professionals; they impose more rules upon themself and other amateurs. this is particularly true amongst Artists, amongst photographers and other self described creatives . Setting standards of thought, by way of controlled dictionaries. A -graph or a -gram. What do you insist others call it>

  • –graph[ French -graphe, from Late Latin -graphus, from Greek -graphos, from praphein, to write
  • –gram [ Greek -gramma, from gramma, letter
  • Sometimes a photograph creates a photogram. often, I called them[dye transfers] glyphs[from carving]

like all social functioning, the art world is not singular.

More closures[around the artworld]:

  • London’s Stephen Friedman Gallery Closes for Good amid Insolvency Proceedings
  • The Centre for Contemporary Arts in Glasgow will shut down after thirty-three years, with all staff losing their jobs. Funding withdrawals, operational deficits, labor disputes, and political protests compounded pandemic-era setbacks.

–/James L. Enyeart, the second director of the CCP from 1977 to 1989, died in Santa Fe, New Mexico, on November 28, 2025. He was 82.

This Is Spinal Tap (1984), The Sure Thing (1985), Stand by Me (1986), The Princess Bride (1987), Misery (1990), and A Few Good Men (1992)….

a year ago the price was $6.79 ..

high achieving adults rarely began as child prodigies .. unfinished sidebar

Obi, N., Kojima, Y., & Shigcmitsu, Y. (1999). Production of superhigh contrast by dyes. The Imaging Science Journal47(1), 43–48. https://doi.org/10.1080/13682199.1999.11736452

GLYCIN Notes:

N-(4-Hydroxyphenyl)glycine (glycin) is synthesized by reacting p-aminophenol with chloroacetic acid. This reaction typically occurs in a solvent and results in the formation of glycin, which is then purified. Other less common methods for synthesizing related compounds exist, such as using glyoxylic acid, but the p-aminophenol and chloroacetic acid reaction is the most direct and widely cited route. https://www.google.com.sl/patents/WO1995018093A1

Glycin, if made using pure regents in a clean, precise method, lasts at room temperature for several years. Kodak brand glycin, “Kodurol”, [alt, Athenon]is still light color after 40 years in storage. Glycin which lasts mere months is less pure. https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/compound/N-_4-Hydroxyphenyl_glycine#section=FTIR-Spectra


John Conway … mathematician… “Game of Life” is how most knew him

college systems provide acess to AI as regular feature for text ..

is there a difference between the paid form of agent? Impulse response answers, YES. While correct, it is incomplete since the full answer is in what the diff is —

Free, tracks you, saving responses as well as datasets. The paid versions assert they do not track nor store your data. In addition, they promise your data can’t leak ..

typical price levels seem like discount club member tiers, one such:

Free, $20/month, $200/month. At different prices, different tracking or “prompt-leak” as the newest term on the software stack.

Read Your own Meter

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.

do you think you are that interesting…  

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.]

Last Dyes

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.
dye diffusion effect

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