Charles Cramer is one of the photographers whose work I greatly admire. Cramer is one of the very premier landscape photographers in the world, having printed his photographic work first using the dye transfer process, then Cibachrome/Ilfochrome (which I have also printed), and now using digital means. I thought it might be interesting for people to see what was necessary to make color prints as recently as 50 years ago.
In this video, he talks about a now-defunct color process called dye transfer. Though I have never printed using that method myself, I have spoken with a few different practitioners of the process and have had the opportunity to drool over a portfolio of "dyes" from Eliot Porter that were in a gallery in Santa Fe. They have a power and a presence that no other media can match. The issue is that it was an extremely difficult process. A regret of my life is that I never got one of my chromes printed as a dye, and I wish like heck that I had.
Another problem for dyes is that they were much less stable than the process that followed, Cibachrome—later known as Ilfochrome. I could be incorrect on this, but I think that dye transfer was one of the very first actual color processes, if not the first one. Seeing the complexity of this process should make any photographer be grateful for the simplicity of contemporary processes.
You can view Charles Cramer's work here.
Jim Bones was Eliot Porter’s printer for a long while; he might have made the prints you saw. I’m awfully impressed by some antique processes that had real quality, but dye transfer definitely was dependent on the skill of execution. So much could go wrong. Each print medium is unique, but I won’t give up on the best modern printing! Let’s see how good they look in another hundred years next to each other!
I think there's no question that a well made and executed pigment based print will have more "lastability". I would however still love to have had a dye made of one of my chromes. It would have to be displayed and stored properly. I have a lot of Cibas/Ilfochrome prints that I made, and I was a pretty good printer. I guess they'll go to our son when I leave this earthly domain. Till then they remain sequestered in boxes in a storage room.