Marvin Heiferman, curator of the show with Carole Kismaric, said at a press conference when the show was at the Chelsea Piers in New York in January and February that he kept looking into every office window in a picture of Times Square to see what was on the walls. He sounded like the observer in 1839 who expressed wonder at being able to count every brick in a daguerreotype. Photography is notorious for giving us more details than the eye can take in unaided, but color photography has not picked up every hair and pore like this. The new experience is like looking at a painting by Jan Van Eyck, who could make you suspect that he habitually regarded the world through a magnifying glass. What we used to think of as reality could never live up to the new inkjet prints.
Human eyes are always on information overload.
Color photographs up to now have been compromises, but we were accustomed to them. No photographer can print quite what he or she saw or what was registered on the negative or transparency because no enlarger can handle it adequately. The computer program Photoshop, however, can - in combination with the right inks, printer and paper and in the hands of a master printmaker like R. Mac Holbert, who printed Mr. Wilkes's images. Digital printing in general can do lots of tricks. Photoshop can restore damaged prints and print them out like new.