Technology has driven the art and science of photography since the invention of the medium in the early 19th century. Digital photography is the most recent development, and in many ways the most perplexing and provocative. New cameras, printing techniques, and software allow artists greater freedom than ever before to take photographs of the real world and to generate images from the imagination. At the same time, the capacity to seamlessly merge and morph pictorial elements has social, political, and legal implications. As a challenge to photography’s documentary nature and as a catalyst for creativity, digital photography has a profound impact on visual culture.

Artists have long promoted innovation, as visionaries and beta-testers of new technologies. Never has that been more true than now. Among the artists working with digital photography, some employ it as an aesthetic tool, others as a platform for investigating new areas of photographic practice. Some treat it as a vehicle for waging social or political critique; others look to it as a subject in and of itself.

The Digital Eye, drawn from public and private collections, presents the work of some of today’s most inventive artists who use digital photographic means. This exhibition is accompanied by Henry Director Sylvia Wolf’s recent book The Digital Eye: Photographic Art in the Electronic Age (Prestel Verlag, 2010).