For those of you interested in the fixer on the negative before development info here is a letter (I finally found it)......... I received from Nancy Renner:
To make the photographs, I put my negatives in a water bath for one minute, pour out the water, then pour used but not exhausted fixer in the tank (about 1/3 the amount of liquid required). (The Greek pictures were all 4"x5" negatives developed in a tank, 12 at a time.) I leave the fixer in only about 10-15 seconds, sometimes shaking the tank, pour out the fixer, do a few water baths, then develop, stop and fix as normal. The results are very uneven, sometimes I totally lose a negative. It helps if your negs are greatly overexposed by 3 stops or so, because the fixer really eats up the silver. Also the strength of the fixer makes a big difference. You just have to play around with it.
