It’s a (Digital) Print

“Photography changed my life,” says Graham Nash, recalling a pivotal moment in his working-class childhood in Blackpool, England. Standing in his amateur-photographer father’s makeshift darkroom, he watched the image of a zoo elephant slowly appear on a piece of white paper in a tray of colorless liquid, and he has never forgotten the magic of that moment. Throughout Nash’s extraordinary career in music--first with the Hollies in the early 1960s, then as a founding member of Crosby, Stills and Nash--he has pursued a parallel life as a photographer and collector and, more recently, as a pioneer in the digital revolution.

In 1990, Nash and his former tour manager, R. Mac Holbert, founded Manhattan Beach-based Nash Editions, the first studio in the country dedicated to producing fine-art digital prints. Representing a decade of experience, work from the studio is currently being showcased in “Digital Frontiers: Photography’s Future at Nash Editions,” an exhibition that recently opened at the George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film here. Organized by Therese Mulligan, Eastman House curator of photography, the exhibition features 37 prints by 16 artists, including, among others, David Hockney, Danny Lyons, Robert Heinecken, Peter Alexander, Eileen Cowin, Robert Cumming, Joyce Neimanas and Nash.

Located in an expanded version of the 37-room mansion completed in 1905 by Kodak founder George Eastman, the Eastman House is perhaps the ideal place to view the cutting-edge of digital imaging and printing techniques. In addition to highlighting the achievement of Nash Editions, the exhibition illustrates the diverse uses to which contemporary artists are putting new technologies, dispelling misconceptions and answering important questions confronting the medium that until recently have impeded photography’s acceptance as an art form by museums and collectors.

Nash cites his move to Los Angeles in 1969 as the beginning of his work as a serious photographer. A year later, he began to collect photographs, often while on the road. Operating on instinct and curiosity, Nash often bought new and vintage works at prices that today would be unthinkable. By the late 1980s, he had one of the most significant private photography collections in the world. Looking toward the digital horizon, he sold the collection at Sotheby’s auction house--some 2,400 images for $2.17 million. Much of the proceeds were plowed into the project that became Nash Editions.

In the mid-’80s, Holbert had begun to experiment with digital scanners. Nash was soon hooked, and the two began looking for ways to print Nash’s photographs. “It was a lot of fun,” Nash recalls, “but when I began to get serious about the images, I discovered that there was no way to get them off the screen.”

Their search led them to UCLA’s visionary workshop Jet Graphics. “The pixels were about the size of a food tray,” Nash quips, “but at least they were printed on decent paper.”

The experience at UCLA was invaluable, but the real breakthrough came when the two were shown an Iris 3047 ink-jet printer. Originally developed to preview images before a commercial print run, the Iris remains the backbone of fine-art digital printing, in part because it can accept a wide range of substrates, from handmade papers to silk and even metal. It was also the first printer that could output a large image--33 inches by 46 inches--at high, continuous-tone resolution.

A team was assembled to adapt the printer to its new purpose. Their first project was a set of 16 portraits by Nash, the first photographic portfolio printed digitally. In a timely vindication of their vision--at least in terms of the art market--one of the portfolios came up for auction at Christie’s on April 8 and sold for $19,500.

*

Desktop publishing may have unleashed a flurry of bad graphic design, yet highly manipulated imagery is far from the dominant theme in this new field. Many traditional photographers do not use the computer to compose their images, preferring to use the expanded range of digital printing to create new effects. “For me,” Nash says, “it comes down to my emotional response to the object. I love the look and feel of Iris prints, the way the light diffuses off of the surface.”

Nash Editions and other studios of its kind have adopted the model of a fine arts press, setting out to create limited editions with painstaking finesse. They have therefore also had to confront an issue that’s as old as printmaking. “Well, it’s a digital file--can’t you run them off by the thousands?” Nash asks rhetorically. “But as with most artists making prints over the last few hundred years, you are subject to the honesty of the people doing your printing.”

In the last decade, publishing and commercial photography have shifted entirely into a digital environment, but the fine arts have been slower to make use of the new medium. As with the grudging acceptance of color photography in the 1970s, longevity was an early issue. Supporters point out, however, that Iris prints are now less fugitive than nearly all traditionally printed color photographs.

“Nash was very fortunate,” says Henry Wilhelm, author of “The Permanence and Care of Color Photographs,” “in that he was the first to use the Iris printer for high-quality photographic output. The experience and openness that he and Mac brought to the field allowed them to look at the [digital] print and accept it as an image, which not everyone could do. I think the digital revolution is every bit as important as the invention of color photography itself. In fact, you could argue that the digital revolution is every bit as important as the invention of photography.”

* “Digital Frontiers: Photography’s Future at Nash Editions” continues at the George Eastman House in Rochester, N.Y. through Oct. 4. (716) 271-3361.