Digital Prints

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Mastering Digital Printing
Digital artist and printmaker JD Jarvis feels that digital work is held up to more rigorous
demands than any other artwork. A gallery owner once was worried that his digital prints
weren’t waterproof. “As if watercolors, photos, and lithos are?” he asked. “I’m making art,
not foul-weather gear.”
Notwithstanding the above arguments and anecdotes, most photographer-artists working
digitally are rightly concerned about print permanence.
Image-stability researcher Henry Wilhelm (see more about him below) brings the point
home with a dramatic example. “The entire era of picture taking from 1942 to 1953 when
people were using box cameras and Kodak’s new Kodacolor print process is lost forever,”
he once explained to me. “There is not one single known print that survives today in reasonable
condition; they are all severely stained and faded.” Pictures and prints are important
to people. Maybe not all of them, but that doesn’t mean that none of them are! And
in the digital age, this becomes even more important because, chances are, the digital files
will not survive, but the prints will. “It’s always been about the print,” says Wilhelm, “and
we can actually produce right now, at very low cost, extremely stable photographs and
prints in color. Do we want to? Ask anybody, “Which would you rather have: a longerlasting
print or a shorter-lasting one?” What do you think the answer will be?”
Family photos have value, but most color prints from the ’40s, ’50s, and even ’60s are now faded or stained. Compare my family’s Kodalux print on the left from
1968 with the Kodak black-and-white print on the right from 1953, which, apart from a slight yellowing on the edges, is otherwise in perfect condition. Both
were stored in the same shoe box.
I believe most photographer-artists sensibly want to be confident that the prints they are
making—for themselves or for sale or gift to others—will last for a reasonable amount
of time under normal conditions. (What “reasonable amount of time” and “normal conditions”
actually mean is, of course, up for grabs.) As digital printing researcher Dr. David