This was written for a digital literacy course in 2001.  My ideas haven’t changed much since then.  I am leaving out the footnotes, except to note where references exist, but if anyone would like the references, please feel free to contact me. 

The end of semester student photography exhibit is a common occurrence in colleges where photography is taught (ref). On  the surface, such exhibits do not look very different in 2001 than they did in 1991. The print quality is usually excellent. The prints are carefully archivally matted and framed for gallery or museum-like presentation. The sophistication and complexity of the students’ photographic vision varies widely, as is to be expected with student work. Contrary to superficial appearances, however, there are substantial differences between the photos on the student gallery walls in 2001 and those in 1991. As one student put it: “I don’t think there is a photo here which hasn’t passed through Photoshop.” What is surprising about this is that the images don’t show obvious indebtedness to Photoshop. With one or two exceptions, there is very little montage or collage among the works. They don’t look like Absolut Vodka ads. They look very much like photography has looked for a long time. There are sensitive and thoughtful portraits. There are carefully composed landscapes and cityscapes. There is some mixed media and combining of texts and images. The primary way in which the images differ from those in 1991 is that they are not traditional silver photographic prints.

These images were, in fact printed on photographic quality paper with an ink-jet printer through a computerized system. Such printers spray tiny jets of ink to create the image. If looked at with a magnifying glass, the lines of the ink-jet path across the paper can be discerned.  A traditional silver photographic print, if looked at under magnification, will reveal the clumping together pattern of the grains of silver. This patterning is random, not linear.  However, when viewed at a conventional viewing distance, even up close with the naked eye, these prints are indistinguishable from their darkroom, silver based predecessors. Without a discernible difference in the appearance of the product, the nature of art photography practice has changed. The potential for digital imaging to change the nature of photography has been remarked upon for some time (refs). digitization alters the nature of the photographic process. The digital file can replace the negative. Photoshop and the ink-jet printer replace the enlarger and developing trays. Will art photography evolve into a new digital art form or will it cloak itself in new technologies to make an art product similar to what has been made for the last fifty years?

Photography has always occupied a somewhat ambiguous position in the art-making community. At first it was considered too mechanical to be an artistic practice. By the time silver prints were finally gaining museum and collector acceptance in the 1970’s and 1980’s, the digitization of the medium was underway (ref). Part of what established photography as an art was the cachet attached to unique silver prints. While a photograph could never be like an original painting or drawing, the argument went, the process of photography involved the hand of the artist: at the moment of exposure and then later in the darkroom. Art photographers were encouraged to sign and number their prints, like printmakers. Photographers who relied on commercial or machine-made prints or who had assistants print their work were held in less esteem than those who did their own darkroom work. The idea of an intimate connection between the artist and the finished product was important in photography’s attempt to gentrify itself into a high art form. Even though photographs were mechanically produced, it was suggested, they still had many attributes of traditional high artworks and were, thus, collectible.

In 1998 a Dorothea Lange print sold at auction for $244,500. (ref). Entitled “Human Erosion in California 1936” this print is one of her most widely reproduced photographs and so would be easily recognized as a well-known photographic work. In addition, this particular print had an element, a portion of a child’s hand, in the lower right corner, which Lange had removed in later versions, thus making it a very unique print and contributing to the high price the Getty Museum paid.

Lange’s is an interesting example because it parallels some of the issues brought up by the digitization  of the medium. Photographers have altered photographs since the invention of the medium (ref). In the late 19th Century the fact that photographs could be altered  increased their acceptability as art in some circles. Artist intervention was seen as superior to strict mechanical representation. Digitization can aid this tendency toward artistic control. While Lange had to alter the negative or crop the print in some way to remove the child’s hand, the contemporary photographer can alter the digital file.

With lens and silver based photography, the starting point of the photographic image is the negative (ref). Historically, as in Lange’s case, and in thousands of others, negatives were manipulated and combined to create the works photographic artists saw in their imaginations. Digitization can intervene at several stages in the photographic process. A digital image file can be the starting point if the original image is taken with a digital camera. Or, the negative or transparency can be digitized and a file created at that point. Lastly, an already existing silver print can be scanned or photographed, resulting in a digital file.

William J. Mitchell argues that with digitization the file itself becomes the “original” work of art (ref). Mitchell goes on to suggest that digital files create artwork that is allographic, functioning something like a musical score. The work is never completed, never static, but changing with each generation or re-generation. The digital work of necessity becomes a group or team endeavor. This description is appropriate for NASA’s image files and many scientific applications, but it is not so easily applied to current art photography. Art photography continues to be a fairly solitary endeavor and not very group or team oriented. Group process may not be intrinsic to digitization. In fact, given the nature of computers as a one-on-one work environment, individualization seems at least as appropriate. Individual authorship in art photography may not diminish, as Mitchell predicts (ref), and future photographic artists may well preserve individual authorship very successfully.

When photographers make prints from individual negatives, the longevity of the negative during the repetitive process is something like printmaking. As a lithographic stone or printing plate deteriorates with use, a negative deteriorates as well. However, the negative’s degradation is more a result of handling than actual physical pressure, as in printmaking. The negative gets scratched. Dust collects; the negative has to be cleaned. It gets scratched again. Photographic prints made earlier in a negative’s life will likely be higher quality than those made later. Mitchell is right to point out that this just doesn’t happen with a digital file (ref). Even though digital image files can be ephemeral and highly mutable (ref), they have the potential to be much more stable than negatives or printing plates. What this means is that digital prints can theoretically be generated at any time without regard to intrinsic longevity.

In practical terms, there may be a caveat: computer systems and software change. Today’s file from Photoshop 6.0 may not open in later versions of the program. However, this potential for reproducibility is what really makes the May 2001 student photo exhibit different. If all those prints on exhibit were to deteriorate or were destroyed, one hundred years from now, if someone came across the CD-ROM, the prints could all be produced again, exactly as the students had intended them to look, provided the “antique” software and appropriate printers could be re-activated.

This is heart warming in some ways. All that artwork is preserved from the ravages of time and air and light and moisture. If a print in a particular exhibit or collection gets damaged, just print another one. But, consider the havoc this can create in the already fragile photographic art market. If artworks are easily replaceable, where is their value as a collectible?

First, there is no doubt that silver prints, signed and made by art photographers, will appreciate dramatically as the implications of digitization begin to sink in to the consciousness of the collecting public. This is already the case with the big names, but anything silver-based will be likely to appreciate. There is a brisk market in vernacular photography on eBay, and this will only accelerate as attic troves of silver prints become more and more scarce.

Color photography presents other problems. A large percentage of the vernacular color photographic prints of the 1950’s, 1960’s and 1970’s were unstable, and these have already degraded badly. On the art production end, photographers were aware of these permanence problems, and many attempted to use the most stable color processes for their work. These more stable color prints, along with Kodachrome slides, which have always been well-known for their longevity, will probably rise in value along with black and white prints. An excellent recent example of the increasing attention to Kodachrome slides is the Cushman Archive at Indiana University (ref). While the decision here has been to share these wonderful Kodachrome images on the WWW, their implicit value is recognized by the university library’s decision to create the archive and so valorize them.

But museums and libraries that readily collect black and white silver prints and Kodachrome slides may well be suspicious about collecting digital prints. Current research indicates that high quality ink-jet prints are very stable and permanent, (ref). Longevity, historically a bugaboo with collecting color photographic work, can no longer be seen as a serious issue, and digitization has created the potential to make infinite multiple artworks from the same source.

Right now it may take some time for the collecting public to notice that there are fundamental differences between digital and traditional silver photographic prints. After all, the digital and photographic print can look superficially identical. Will digital artists find ways to make their work attractive to collectors and museums? The notion of signed, limited editions (always kind of silly with photography) will probably continue. Some artists may advocate and follow through on destroying their digital files at the end of an edition of digital prints. Collectors may initially shun digital prints the way the painting and print buying public originally shunned silver photographs, but eventually, just as photography became accepted, digital art photography will be accepted, displayed and collected. A.D. Coleman also suggests that a new category of artwork is emerging which he calls “computer art” (ref). Such works, whether they exist on the WWW, on CD- ROM’s, or in printed versions may in embody the true potential of digital media in the visual arts. Like photographs at the birth of the medium one hundred and fifty years ago these digital artworks will now be the poor cousins in the art establishment and occupy the ambiguous position photography occupied for so long.