A Thank You To The Hunt Bros.

The Hunt brothers decided that the solution to going from extremely wealthy to obscenely wealthy was to corner the market on silver, drive up the price, then bail out. It almost worked.

In the meantime the price of film was skyrocketing as the price of silver went up and up. One night I was sitting around chatting photography with my friend Al Olme and some others, probably including Nathan Benn, Al Wessel, and Paul and Louise Dana, and the topic if conversation was film and paper prices.

One idea that we knocked around was making a film that could be processed in color chemistry. I think it was still C-22 at the time, not C-41. The idea was that it would have a black dye image and all the silver gets bleached out and reclaimed, just like color film. We didn't know it at the time but across the Big Pond Ilford was already working on it. Soon they introduced XP-1.