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 ...