On the redoubtable Kim Dutoit's website Splendid Isolation today were pics of various female stars in relaxed legs akimbo poses. The first one was of Sophia Loren. This put me in mind of my salad days back in the early seventies when I worked in the lab for the portraitists to the rich and famous, Gittings Photography in Houston, Texas. An unlikely location for the firm perhaps, but the R&F from around the world sat for them.
This was an absolutely top-notch outfit that literally spared no expense in creating the richest and most finely detailed large portraits ever made. They also did society weddings and portraits all over the U.S. and the world, but their high end signature portraits were flat out incredible, the finest in the land, and probably the world. For the "big game" the images were captured on 8X10 inch negative film shot on Linhof view cameras with Zeiss lenses. As many as fifty negatives were shot, the sittings alone cost several thousand dollars, 8X10 full color contact "proofs" were made, and the images destined for printing were selected by the customer.
The largest prints, aptly named the Imperial line, were huge 40X60 inch dye-transfer prints. Dye-transfer prints were extraordinarily difficult to make, in that size especially, and cost $1600 each at the time, within shouting distance of ten grand today. It was not reality, it was very much heightened reality. A weak comparison would be the difference between ordinary color movie film and the three strip Technicolor process, with which the dye-transfer print process shares some optical and chemical similarities. Nothing available today is remotely as rich, detailed, and utterly lifelike.
For years a full length portrait of Sophia Loren was on display at the Gittings storefront in a local very tony mall. One could not simply walk past it. It captured her at the apex of her mature glory. It glowed, it demanded, it absolutely required that one stand mute and transfixed by her stupefying beauty and keen intelligence. The English language is simply not capable of describing the impact of that image. The Bard his own self would struggle with the words.
Sadly, high end dye-transfer portraits are no longer being done, commercially at least. They are a casualty of the decline of formal portraiture in general. A great pity.
