Digital Prints

1
Navigating the Digital
Landscape
Like the early explorers who probed the fringes of the known world with their new sextants
and square-rigged ships, photographers and other artists continually experiment with
and adopt new technologies, and digital printing is the latest in a long line of artistic innovations.
With photographers stepping out of their toxic darkrooms and other artists
embracing digital workflows, everyone wants to know more about what digital printing
is—and what it isn’t. This chapter puts digital printing into context and gives you a basic
understanding of its role in the printmaking process.
Birth of the Digital Printing Revolution
While artists have been using computers to create and even output images for decades (see
the sidebar entitled “Computers, Art, and Printmaking: A Brief History”), things didn’t
really take off until two groups on opposite sides of the U.S. started to put their attentions
on a new way of imagemaking.
Jon Cone’s Computer-Assisted Printmaking
In 1980, Jon Cone, who was educated and trained as a traditional fine-art printmaker and
who owned an art gallery in New York City’s SoHo district, founded an experimental and
collaborative printmaking studio in the waterfront town of Port Chester, New York. There,
from 1980 to 1984, printmaker Cone worked with artists in the media of silkscreen,
intaglio, relief, monoprint, and photogravure.
Sensing, however, that the computer could be an advantageous tool for experimental printmaking
and wanting to break away from the pack of other printmakers, many of whom were
horrified by what he was doing, Cone started experimenting with scanners and learning computer
programming. Combining his skills as a master printmaker and a recent computer geek
(he was mesmerized by the 1984 Apple Macintosh TV commercial), he started to shift into