Digital Photographic Prints.

Take Their Place in Galleries and Museums

Many fine art photographers hove embraced digital printing--with its ever-increasing quality and versatility--as a way to achieve their visions and market their work.

The days of recognizing a digital print of a photo by the dots on the image, jagged edges or an unrealistic sense of sharpness are long gone. Today's digital prints are big, bold, bright and believable. Most people don't even know the photos they are viewing are digital prints, said Trudy Wilner Spack, curator of exhibitions and collections at the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona in Tucson.

"Unless the prints have labels, the only technical information people see is what kind of print they are looking at--and with digital prints, most labels don't actually say `digital prints,'" Spack said.

Digital prints are packaged under a variety of names, including giclee, fuji crystal archive, carbon-based pigment and pigment on watercolor paper. All of these creatively avoid the word "digital"--a word with negative connotations, when it comes to photography and fine art.

"People think, `is (the artist) manipulating the image?' They don't trust (the photograph) as much," said Brent Beamon, managing consultant at the Edward Carter Gallery in New York. "On one hand, they are skeptical, on the other, it comes down to whatever it takes to make a beautiful image."

Spack agrees that digital printing raises a number of questions in the mind of the average viewer. "When you're doing digital photography, it's easy to tweak things. People ask, could that color really be that way in nature?" …