Don't forget that our only print sale for the Fall of this year and the last TOP print sale of 2019 will start ONE WEEK FROM TOMORROW on November 29th!
There's an important catch, so read my comments down below the press release.
Here's the press release:
Download "Upcoming Dye Transfer Print Sale" press release
You can help us out (please?) by posting this at other sites and forums you visit and participate in. Feel free to use any or all of it.
Here's the text:
November 20, 2019—for immediate release—
Expert West Coast Photographic Printmaker to Liquidate His Entire Inventory of Rare and Prized Color Prints
San Francisco area photographer and master printmaker Ctein is offering his entire lifetime archive of rare traditional dye transfer prints for sale. The sale will take place on The Online Photographer website (https://) starting at noon Pacific Standard Time on November 29th, the Friday after Thanksgiving, and continue for seven days only.
Ctein (his only name—pronounced "kuh-TINE") is selling full-sized 16x20-inch dye transfers for only $650 per print on a first-come, first-served basis. More than 250 images will be offered. Interested readers can view these in advance at http://ctein.com/2019TOPDyeSale.htm.
Ctein, among the best-known and most accomplished of the dye transfer printers, worked in the medium for 40 years until he closed his darkroom in 2013. Now, connoisseurs can own a beautiful, genuine dye transfer print for their own collections.
Dye transfer, widely acknowledged to be the Rolls-Royce of traditional color printing methods back in the era of film photography, was extremely difficult to master and expensive and time-consuming to practice. Dye transfer prints have a distinctive beauty and purity of color. They have a greater color gamut and deeper maximum black than even inkjet prints, and were among the most permanent of all color processes.
Such prints were always rare and always expensive, and master printers in the medium have always been few and far between. By 1994, when Kodak finally discontinued making the materials, most of the active dye transfer printers in the US could fit in a single living room. Now a scant handful are left.
For more information, please contact Ctein at [email protected] or Mike Johnston of The Online Photographer at [email protected].
As you already know if you've been following along, this year's print sale isn't for any one picture. Ctein will be offering for sale his entire remaining inventory of superbly made dye transfer prints. May of the pictures are sold out, and some exist in the inventory in only one remaining copy—what remains, and in what number, depends on how many were originally made and how many have been sold over the years. Rarity doesn't necessarily imply popularity, because Ctein made more prints of the more popular pictures over the years.
So here's the key: decide in advance what you might want, and order it promptly! That's the best way to insure you'll get the print of your choice.
The ordering process is necessarily more complicated than usual, but we'll explain all that. For now, the important thing is to determine what you want so you're prepared to move quickly when the time comes.
Even if you don't want a print, this is a perfect example of an exercise in delectation recommended by so many experts, from Thomas Hoving, the famous Director of the Metropolitan Museum, to, well, me. An exercise in delectation is just an exercising of your own taste. Hoving would walk into an unfamiliar room in a museum, scan the paintings on the wall, and decide immediately which pictures he wanted to spend time with. I've always felt that deciding "what I would buy if I could buy only one" is an effective form of the same exercise. Cumulatively, such exercises are an excellent way to refine and clarify our own taste (which is always changing and never static, too).
Here's the link again to see the pictures: http://ctein.com/2019TOPDyeSale.htm.
Mike
Original contents copyright 2019 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.
Please help support The Online Photographer through Patreon
(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:
Al DaValle: "Hi Mike, I'm honestly not tying to be a smartass here but I thought Ctein's last sale (I purchased a print) was his last. I think I recall him using up the very last of his dye transfer chemicals etc. Did I dream that up? Miss something? Did he happen upon a new cache of material?
"P.S. I'm not expecting you to publish this on your site...just a question. :-) "
Mike replies: No problem Al, you can ask away. The last sale was his "closing the darkroom" sale, meaning that it was the last time anyone could buy specific images made to order. On that occasion he had enough raw materials left for approximately 160 full-size prints, if memory serves, and—again if memory serves—those sold out in six hours and two minutes. All those prints were made new, to order, and afterward he dismantled his darkroom.
The prints in the coming sale are from his archive of stock prints which he maintained for many years. When receiving an order for a print he would make several extras, and store the extras against possible future orders. A number of those still exist, and those are what are being offered in this upcoming sale.
There are two big problems with this sale: each of the images is available in very limited numbers, between one and five. It's quite possible that there could be more orders for a given image than there are prints, so not everyone will automatically get their first choice. Second—this is just from the production end—spotting dye prints is very labor-and time-intensive, and his normal practice was to archive the print unspotted, and spot each one prior to shipping when it was sold. But to offer all these at once, obviously they all need to be spotted. So he's been working for months to spot all the prints so they'll be ready to go out!
But none of the archive prints are being made to order—they can't be. There are no more materials and there is no more darkroom and many of the matrices have been sold. What you got last time was one of the last 160 prints he ever made. These are archived prints from stock, made over a period of many years prior to the closing of the darkroom.
Comments