Originally Posted by
Drew Wiley
Perhaps I should have clarified something about teminology. In these current discussions, things tend to get phrased around "analog versus digital". But in the past it was basically phrased around photographic versus graphic reproduction techniques; and some of the nuance has carried over. For example, photolithographs
and color gravures were classified as graphic processes, even though they originated with a camera, while something like a dye transfer print tended to be
classified as a photograph itself, even though it was capable of serial reproduction,
because it used something analogous to film itself. There are no absolute rules in
any of this, of course, but there is quite a bit of precedent in photographic history.
By analogy, some of us might not choose to refer to an inkjet print as a photograph,
while we might call a darkroom print one. This in itself does not imply that one
medium is inferior to the other, but is just based upon a continuity of an existing
tradition which many younger workers seem to be unaware of. For there have been
many, many ways to make photographic prints other than the handful routinely
advertised nowadays. And pigments prints existed for decades before the commercialization of computers or software.