How do you sign your prints?

[Mark Sawyer]

I agree that "digital signatures" are a bit cheezy. That's why I had a rubber stamp made of my signature, and I stamp each print by hand for that personal touch...

...okay, seriously, I sign at the lower right corne of the print, on the matt, in pencil. That way, if I give a print to one of my high school students, they can erase my name and put theirs in. Yup, some of them do that...

[David de Gruyl]

I agree that "digital signatures" are a bit cheezy. That's why I had a rubber stamp made of my signature, and I stamp each print by hand for that personal touch...
(

That would actually be pretty impressive in China... (more impressive than just writing, as I understand it)

[Thebes]

I must disagree that digital art is nebulous and it as “no definitive version". In the past 50 years I’ve shot 35mm to 4x5 and some 16mm cine. I’ve loved every second of it. I still shoot LF and apply my shooting skills to digital. Unlike many digital shooters who just pull the trigger and blaze away, I would spend hours or days trying to get that one shot with digital. 35mm, LF or digital are all tools, nothing more nothing less.

I don't think you are understanding what BetterSense meant. I do not believe that he intended to belittle skills or digital images. One of the things that has historically been spoken of when talking about photography as art is the thing itself. (true of other mediums too, eg "This is not a pipe") This might, in the mind of the artist, have been the matted and framed contact print in a numbered edition... it might have been a polaroid... it might have been a carbon transfer onto paper- in all of these cases there is a thing apart from the image that is the actual object of art. With a digital file, there might be many things, each able to be copied on a moments notice, and many different from each other- which is the object of art? How do we know the object from altered versions, such as jpeg thumbnails? What is the thing itself and how does that effect the meaning of the art.

I think the proposal to encrypt a signature into the finished file as a means of fixing it as a discrete thing is brilliant. This has nothing to do with how many images one makes or the efforts in making them or if they are good, it was a philosophical point about art theory as it relates to digital images.

[Milton Tierney]

OK, I think I understand and no I didn’t think that BetterSense intended to belittle digital images. Sorry, I've been unable to shake a nasty virus for the last month and it’s left me a little thick headed.