In November 1963, a National Photographic Interpretation Center (NPIC) analyst filed a slightly envious memo about how the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey was pulling off color aerial photography — a feat NPIC found impressive enough to investigate in detail. What the memo captures is a workflow so hand-crafted it reads more like darkroom sorcery than government surveying.

The star of the operation was a man named Smith, who apparently did everything himself:

"In flight the camera is operated by an experienced photographer, oftentimes Smith, himself... Smith does his own processing with, of all things, the Zeiss F.E. 120 processors; (these are the same gadgets NPIC representatives used overseas in 1956)."

But the truly forgotten piece of craft is buried in item (i):

"Smith uses Anscochrome taking film and makes his prints on Printon paper: this is a direct positive-to-positive procedure. (We can do this at NPIC)."

Ansco's Printon was a color reversal print material — you exposed a positive color transparency directly onto the paper and developed a positive print, skipping the negative entirely. No orange-mask color negative, no internegative step, no color correction between stages. What you shot was what you printed. Ansco (the American arm of Agfa) discontinued the process by the late 1960s, and with it went one of the only true direct positive-to-positive color print workflows ever commercialized. Modern color photography — even in the film revival era — is almost universally negative-to-positive (C-41/RA-4). To get anything comparable today, you'd have to hunt down expired Ilfochrome/Cibachrome stock, itself discontinued in 2011.

The memo also preserves one gloriously human detail about the survey's working conditions:

"Smith is able to process 400' per day under normal conditions, however, should he foul up, he just goes back and flies again another day."

For NPIC — reading overflight film of Cuba and the USSR where a "foul up" meant losing the only chance at a target — this must have read like a description of paradise. The CIA analyst's list of "wonderful cooperation between ANSCO," "ample time to develop the complete system through trial and error," and "ideal weather conditions" was a polite way of noting that no intelligence agency ever gets those luxuries.

• Anscochrome: A reversal film chemistry from the Binghamton, NY plant — gone by 1977 when GAF exited photo.
• Printon: The matching direct-positive paper. Almost no surviving samples exist outside archives.
• Zeiss F.E. 120: A field-portable film processor still in NPIC use eight years after its 1956 overseas deployment.

Modern readers who love the "look" of vintage Kodachrome slides are chasing an echo of what Smith was routinely printing on paper — a physical color print made without ever passing through a negative, with dye couplers built into the emulsion itself. It's a chemistry we simply don't manufacture anymore.