In the late 1980s, I noticed photography’s transition from analog to digital in small ways in printed media. I saw it in typography in the East Village Eye that was elongated on a computer, and in the artificially sharpened images that occasionally cropped up in the New York Times. But only after the turn of the millennium did the powerful, digital prepress tools we know today—ultra-high-resolution scanners, imagesetters, and inkjet printers—become widely available to photographers in their darkrooms and studios.Observing the transition in 2005, Richard Benson, a photographer and dean of the Yale School of Art, singled out mimicry as“… one of the miracles of digitization.” He wrote that digital imagery “has the power, when used with the proper tools, to take on the character of almost anything else,” adding that “files of binary numbers can generate music, display text, and even lay down ink- or dye-based color photographs.” Quickly though, generations of photographers took advantage of the tools newly at their fingertips to other ends, creating images that went far beyond Benson’s mimicry. Advances in digital printing, such as introducing pigments to make inkjet prints more permanent, enabled works that went beyond—imperceptibly or dramatically—what was possible in the analog darkroom. Quickly but quietly, new printers changed what a photograph could be, even blurring the line between image and art object.Shannon Ebner: Subtidal Ears, 2023–25. Courtesy kaufmann repetto, New YorkLIKE MANY PHOTOGRAPHERS, I was never formally trained. Fifty years ago, I learned from technical books and by talking to other photographers as I made work. Because I had learned on the fly, when digital arrived, getting a handle on this new technology had a familiar learning curve. Everyone was feeling their way around, reading whatever they could, and talking to anyone who might know a little more than they did about digital. There were always conflicting opinions about how to do everything from scanning to printing to Photoshop in the early 2000s, and to some extent today. With no unitary path forward, there were six ways to Sunday; a lot of delightful experimentation ensued.In 1995 I started using an Iris printer in my own work. An Iris printer—a large-format inkjet printer introduced by Intel in 1985—prints an image on a spinning sheet of paper affixed to a plexiglass drum, inscribing the image in ink line-by-line as it moves across the paper. A few years after I made my first Iris prints, I noticed photographs printed with a new device, the Lambda digital printer. This game-changing exposure device, introduced in 1994, combines analog and digital processes: A rapidly moving laser beam exposes light sensitive paper to create precisely controlled color—and later, black-and-white—prints.I first saw the transformative power of the digital enlarger in Anne Collier’s early 2000 photographs of book spreads and album covers, photographed head-on against stark white backdrops. Collier’s photographs required these white surfaces to be rendered in perfectly neutral tones, that is, without warm or cool color casts, to convey the quiddity of her subjects. Anyone who has attempted to print a photograph of a blank white wall using an analog color enlarger will know that this sort of neutral tonality is nearly impossible to maintain. The whites shift either toward cyan or magenta, and after multiple test exposures, eye fatigue is inevitable. The digital device creates an entirely new type of color print in which the most subtle color hues are fixed, as they are in Collier’s exquisitely accurate neutrals.Dawoud Bey: Untitled #1 (Picket Fence and Farmhouse), 2018. Courtesy Sean Kelly Gallery, New York; Stephen Daiter Gallery, Chicago; and Rena Bransten Gallery, San FranciscoDawoud Bey also used a similar laser-based machine to make his series of landscape photographs, “Night Coming Tenderly, Black” (2017). Bey’s gelatin silver prints in this magisterial series, shot during daylight but printed to replicate deep twilight, trace the imagined journey of an enslaved person northward through Ohio, to arrive at the tree-lined margin of Lake Erie. The photographs are printed quite dark, and Bey has referenced the Acheronian prints of Roy DeCarava as an influence. What floored me when I saw “Night Coming Tenderly, Black” at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston was the precise separation and legibility of the darkest tones in Bey’s prints. In a traditional darkroom, printing values so close in range while keeping them still distinct would have been nearly impossible, especially across the series’ many individual images. Using the digital print process, Bey controlled the entire lower end of tonal registry to illuminate his rigorous vision.While Collier and Bey craft their images with the laser devices, other artists, such as Wade Guyton and Isabel Gouveia, use glitchy printers to introduce visual disturbances in their prints. Guyton became known for making extra-wide inkjet “paintings” by printing on folded canvas that he forced through his 44-inch Epson printer. The stern grayscale typographic content of these early works, paired with Guyton’s off-road approach to inkjet printing, produces an intensely material viewing experience. Isabel Gouveia, meanwhile, prints lyrical botanical portrayals on her badly behaving smaller-format Canon printer that she then scans and collages together to create long scrolls of imagery. Richly colored and romantic, Gouveia’s images suggest the unending plenitude of natural forms. Somewhat unexpectedly, as photography was becoming more digital, it was also becoming more material.Wade Guyton: Untitled, 2006.Courtesy Museum of Modern Art, New York/©Wade GuytonDIGITAL TECHNOLOGY HASN’T rendered the darkroom completely obsolete. Rather, scanning and inkjet printing have catalyzed new printing possibilities through analog-digital hybrids. In the mid-1990s, photographers began printing high-resolution negatives on their inkjet printers for use in the analog darkroom. In 2015 Jeff Whetstone harnessed this hybrid digital/analog workflow to create “Crossing the Delaware,” a 20-foot-long gelatin silver print. To do this, Whetstone gathered a slew of his analog and digital photographs of the Lower Trenton Bridge and converted them to inkjet negatives. He then taped dozens of these digital negatives together to form an enormous collage that he contact-printed on a 40-inch roll of photographic paper. The print is not only Herculean in scale, but impressively even: Whetstone took advantage of the precise control that digital negatives offer to produce consistent light and dark values.Shannon Ebner works resolutely in black and white—which may seem straightforward enough, but before 2006, no inkjet printer could produce a consistently neutral black-and-white print. In that year, Epson introduced a package of hardware and software that could finally generate a black-and-white print that looked, well, black and white. When I first saw Ebner’s tough grayscale prints, I realized that for Ebner and other photographers, such as Mark Armijo McKnight, black-and-white digital printing was becoming, as the expression goes, “the new black.”Louise Lawler: Big (adjusted to fit), 2002/2003/2016.©The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by Art Resource, New YorkBefore the advent of full-frame digital SLR cameras in about 2005, the flatbed scanner was the only way to make digital files large enough for high-res prints. So, in 2001, Brandon Lattu made his 30-inch prints using an Epson scanner, recording all six sides of multicolored boxes of food products, crackers, cereals, and teas. In Photoshop, Lattu joined the edges of the scans to form 3D-seeming representations. Lattu’s final move was to adjust the transparency of each product so that the boxes looked as if they were made in multicolored plexiglas.Thomas Ruff: d.o.pe.04 I, 2022.Courtesy David Zwirner, New York/©Thomas Ruff/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New YorkThe possibilities, size-wise, have increased dramatically. Louise Lawler’s “(adjusted to fit),” series, begun in 2011, requires that industrial inkjet printers be employed to “adjust” the size of her photograph to cover the entirety of the wall it will occupy. Instructions for installing the work involve typing the dimensions into Photoshop and then specifying that the image be “unconstrained.” This creates what is called a ratio distortion: The image covers the entire wall, but gets stretched or squished. Lawler is not specific about the type of printer to use, leaving open the opportunity to re-create the work far into the future as the technology evolves. One “(adjusted to fit)” work was recently “wall papered” over the lobby of the Museum of Modern Art. This immersive and architecturally scaled photograph still manages to capture Lawler’s witty institutional critique vibe: A sculpture of Picasso’s head glares at the viewer in front of an impossibly stretched photograph by Thomas Struth of Berlin’s Pergamon Museum.Wall murals like Lawler’s require behemoth industrial printers. But now, everyday consumers can use this technology to order a custom-made carpet, or a birthday cake with a digital snapshot printed on it. For Thomas Ruff’s 2022 “d.o.pe.” series—the initials refer to Aldous Huxley’s 1954 autobiographical Doors of Perception—the artist ordered gigantic inkjet tapestries emblazoned with his digitally created fractal dragons. The deep-pile surface of each carpet burns with chromatic intensity. Ruff, who in his 2009 inkjet “Zycles” created large abstract images with three-dimensional rendering software of algorithms based on cycloids, is fascinated by mathematics and by the most advanced research into visual phenomena. Yet despite his interest in the present, the textiles and extreme imagery in “d.o.pe’” feel surprisingly retro, and recall the craze for all things fractal that washed over visual culture in the 1980s.View of Liz Deschenes’s 2023 exhibition “Gravity’s Pull” at Miguel Abreu Gallery, New YorkIndustrial printing technologies now permit artists to put an image on almost any surface. Liz Deschenes took advantage of this for her 2023 series using the newest technology: UV inkjet printing. The UV process is so named because the inks are mixed with a glue that hardens, much like a gel manicure, under the bright light of an ultraviolet lamp that trails the print head. Instant dry allows Deschenes to seamlessly attach her pastel-colored monochrome inks to medium-size square sheets of Gorilla glass. Deschenes has long aspired to create dimensional photographs. Moves like this go far beyond digital’s analog mimicry to generate work that is neither photographic nor anything but.