This article appeared in the September/October 1999 issue of PT. To purchase this issue and receive this and other valuable articles in this issue, CLICK HERE: Ship within the U.S. | Ship outside the U.S.

September/October 1999

I’ve been charged with divining where color photography may go in the coming decades. I have no crystal ball squirreled away in my darkroom, but I have some modest sense of the trends and history of color photography that have led us to the present situation. Failure to learn from these lessons of the past might not condemn us to repeat them, but may leave us surprised by future developments.

While the technologies and the major players constantly change, there have been long-term trends and driving forces behind the developments for the better part of a century. I see nothing on the horizon to change that. “Digital” imaging and printing are not radical departures from those patterns; they are part of a mainstream that contains more than one current.

The dominant, recurring theme of color history has been that a pre-eminent technology gets replaced by an upstart technology that is inferior in some aspect but that’s cheaper. The new, inferior technology steadily improves until sometimes it equals or eclipses its predecessor, although rarely in every respect. Then a newer, cheaper technology comes along to challenge it. This pattern is not inevitable, but we’ve seen it often.

By way of example, consider the love of my life, dye transfer printing. Dye transfer was primarily killed off by chromogenic printing, and many point to this as an example of how the bad displaced the good, as if chromogenic printing were inherently evil and dye transfer printing were a Garden of Eden we’d been thrown out of.

Much as I would love to claim residence in Paradise, the story isn’t morally simple. Before dye transfer, there was tri-color carbro printing. Those pigment prints were fully as lovely as dye transfer prints, and the process gave the artist just as much artistic control. Pigment prints were as close to permanent as any photographic print has been, with both a display life and a dark storage life measured in centuries. Compared to them, dye transfer prints are unstable and impermanent, especially on display. How ironic, then, that one of the main qualities for which we promote dye transfer prints is their permanence—they’re exceptionally permanent only when compared to chromogenic prints. What goes around comes around.

Figure 1. A chromogenic (i.e., Type C) print from a medium-format Konica Impresa 50 color negative. The dye transfer print I made from the same negative has much better color saturation and more accurate color, especially in the greens and yellows. The dye transfer print has higher midtone contrast, but it is overall a contrast match for the RA-4 print; i.e., it portrays the same subject luminance range. The additional tonal separation in the dye transfer is due to the much longer density range (upwards of 2.6 d.u.) that a dye print can produce.

Lessons from the past
The above summary is a gross oversimplification. The biggest error would be making the verbs past tense. Processes in photography have a habit of persisting far beyond their heyday. There are people today making both color pigment and dye transfer prints. Not very many of us, and we are no longer part of the mainstream. But we do persist.

I used to think that I would be the very last of the dye transfer printers. Dye transfer prints use some photographic materials that require sophisticated manufacturing techniques (in contrast, most serious home darkroom workers would be able to make their own pigment-printing materials). Kodak was the sole supplier of dye transfer materials. When they abruptly killed dye transfer six years ago, no one else in the world was making materials for the process. The market had become so small that it seemed unlikely anyone would. Those of us who continue printing do so with materials we have stockpiled.

Not too long after Kodak’s fatal actions, Dr. Jay Patterson established a company in Texas to make new dye transfer materials. The last time I checked, he still hasn’t released any products for general consumption, but he hasn’t stopped working on it, and I haven’t given up hope. Significantly, this year my colleague James Browning announced that he is going into the commercial dye transfer printing business—the first new dye transfer enterprise to appear in more than a decade! Since I also provide dye transfer printing services, that means photographers have at least three sources for such services in this country.

How did Jim accomplish this? He built his own emulsion coating machine in his basement to produce the key material, matrix film! Jim tells me it’s not all that difficult to do, although it’s far beyond what I’d be willing to tackle. If Jim’s venture succeeds, dye transfer printing will not entirely disappear from the planet until Jim does. Meanwhile, photographers everywhere who desire the finest of contemporary prints are still able to get them made, albeit at high prices.

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