(Adapted from Chapter One of Harald Johnson's book "Mastering Digital Printing: The Photographer's and Artist's Guide to High-Quality Digital Output" (Muska & Lipman/Course Technology, 2003).) Gaining Ground: A Question of Acceptance by Harald Johnson December, 2002 © 2002-2003 Harald Johnson Artists have been criticized for adopting new technologies since they first rubbed (or blew) colored dirt on the walls of the caves at Lascaux, France. Oil on canvas was considered heresy by the tempera-on-wooden-panels crowd in the mid-1400s. Photography was blasted as a perversion in the early 19th century. The same with lithography. And it is no different with digital technology, which many photographer-artists--the true opportunists that they are--have readily adopted. While the digital printing boom includes everyone from aging Baby Boomers who are creating family photo prints in their home offices to professional artists selling fine-art prints through galleries, it is the latter group who are the pioneers and who push the edges of print quality, durability, and acceptability. And, it has been a challenging decade to gain the public's and the art community's acceptance. First attempts at digital printing were crude and focused on the technology itself. But art typically expands to absorb new technologies, and after the initial, giddy, "look what I can do" phase, photographers and artists have evolved to the point of focusing on a true artistic goal: moving us with their images. A watershed event marking the art world's acceptance of digital art was the Whitney Museum of American Art's exhibition in March 2001, Bitstreams: Exploring the Importance of Digital Technology in American Art. It was the first Whitney show to focus on the impact of digital media, and, importantly, it included several digital prints. The real high-art eye-opener occurred three months later with the Brooklyn Museum of Art's Digital: Printmaking Now exhibition that ran from June through August, 2001. The second-largest art museum in the U.S. put a huge stamp of approval on digitally created art. ABOVE: Chuck Close's inkjet self-portrait stares back at the digerati attending the Brooklyn Museum of Art's exhibition on digital printmaking, August, 2001. © 2001 Harald Johnson Digital prints (primarily inkjets or "giclées"--defined here) are now part of the permanent collections of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C., and the Art Institute of Chicago. Even the Louvre, The Musée D'Orsay, the Hermitage, the National Gallery, and the Library of Congress are now reproducing some of their most important holdings (van Gogh, Matisse, Picasso, Warhol, Seurat, Winslow Homer, Ansel Adams, Man Ray, Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Edward Curtis) by way of digital printing. However, digital printing is not just for the high-art crowd. The proof is in the almost-universal acceptance of digital printing technologies by mini- and custom photo labs, online photo services, and by e-commerce businesses who are providing art buyers with high-quality prints that fit somewhere between inexpensive posters and unobtainable originals. Even art festivals, shows, and contests are getting into the digital act. While there are still naysayers, more and more of these local and regional events are adding "digital art" or "digital print" categories to their official entry rules. ABOVE: Digital artist Ileana explains her craft at the 2001 Sawdust Art Festival in Laguna Beach, California. Ileana adds, "I ended up selling seven pieces (six on canvas, one on paper). None of the people that bought my work reported misgivings about the media (or the price since I had two people buy a pair of prints). In fact, I don't remember being asked about it. People were only interested in the imagery." Image courtesy Ileana Frómeta Grillo To be sure, there were questions and problems with digital printing early on. The first IRIS inks were notorious for their ability to fade right off the paper. But subsequent improvements in ink formulations and in ink/paper matching have ended many of those arguments. Probably the remaining obstacle to the full acceptance of digital print methods today is the faulty perception that this type of art is "mechanical" and, therefore, inferior in some way. Nothing could be further from the truth. Let's face it, people who are used to slower, more traditional practices sometimes have a hard time adjusting to newer, automated ways of doing things. However, technical methods including automation do not necessarily diminish the value of the creative works aided by them. Besides the obvious examples of lithography and photography, look further back in art history. Michelangelo used teams of assistants as did Leonardo DaVinci. Painters such as Caravaggio, Ingres, Velasquez, and Vermeer all used either a camera obscura or a camera lucida lens system to speed up and improve the initial drafting step in their paintings. In his 2001 book, Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters, author David Hockney, who himself is one of the world's best-known living artists, makes a solid argument that artists were enthusiastically using lenses and mirrors (the highest of high-tech at the time) in creating their art 400-500 years ago. It's a small step from optics to computers and digital workflows, and Hockney's book has helped open people's eyes to the fact that technology has always been an important part of art creation. The computer and other digital tools are just that--tools. Used in the hands of a perceptive, talented artist or photographer, a computer is not subordinate to brushes, palette knives, or enlargers. The fact is, the artist's own hand lies heavy on most of the steps in the making of digital art. Using cameras, scanners, digital tablets, and a whole host of image-editing software, photographers and artists have a personal and intense relationship with their images as they guide them through the various stages of creation, manipulation, and finally, printing. The aesthetic decisions are always the artist's. With the exception of "machine art," this is not mechanical art; this is imagery that emanates directly from the mind and the soul of the artist. # # # About the Author: Harald Johnson is the author of the book Mastering Digital Printing: The Photographer's and Artist's Guide to High-Quality Digital Output (Muska & Lipman, 2003), the moderator of the digital-fineart discussion list, and the creator of the website DP&I.com (www.dpandi.com), the online digital printing and imaging resource. He can be reached at harald@dpandi.com. ^ back to top For other Digital Acceptance stories on this site, click here. Home | About Us | Advertise | Contact Us News & Reviews | How-To's | Resources © 2002-2004 Harald Johnson Communications. All rights reserved.