"What should I call my print?" is one of the questions that I get asked most often. And the answer is not as straightforward as one might think. Names matter, ask any taxonomist. And how to name prints made on a professional wide-colour gamut inkjet printer with archival pigment inks is a source of much discussion and debate amongst printers, photographers, artists, collectors, curators, archivists and gallery owners.
For those who don't have the time to read all this malarkey, you are welcome to skip to my recommendations at the end. Which is probably the sensible thing to do, only print nerds like myself should really find this interesting.
But I do find it fascinating that there is still no universally agreed descriptive term for these prints, even though this is probably the world's most widely used fine art and photographic print technology. Descriptive terms like 'oil on canvas' or 'watercolour' or 'silver gelatin print' are widely accepted and used and understood. But there is a bewildering, and sometimes incorrect, range of nomenclature used to describe inkjet prints. A good example would be the recent 2023 Investec Cape Town Art Fair. Among the assortment of descriptive terms I saw attached to prints on display were.....
Fine art print on Hahnemuehle
Archival inkjet print on enhanced matte paper
Ilford Crystal Gloss Giclee
Glicee (sic) print on Fine Art Baryta paper
Archival Hahnemuehle inkjet print
Giclee print on cotton rag
Pigment inks on Hahnemeuhle etching paper 310gsm
Inkjet print on baryta paper
Archival print on Hahnemuehle Baryta Photo Rag
Etc.....
Clearly we have a situation where there is not a standard, widely accepted, naming convention for pigment inkjet prints. This seems strange given the almost ubiquitous adoption of inkjet printing for fine art and photographic prints.
Why the Tower of Babel?
Maybe the first question to ask is why this situation exists? I would guess that it's partly due to the relative newness of the technology. Archival-quality inkjet prints have only been a viable option since about the early 2000's. It will probably take some time to reach any kind of universally accepted naming convention.
The other reason for the convoluted and slightly tortured naming convention, I suspect, is the attempt to avoid words like 'digital' and 'inkjet'. To anyone who, like myself, grew up in the '80's and '90's, the term 'inkjet printer' somehow still refers to a cheap desktop document printer. And the word 'digital' is equally suspect and still, for me, and others, on some kind of instinctual level the opposite of 'original' or 'unique' or 'fine art'. Hence the attempts to create a distinguished and impressive sounding term that distances itself from a cheap, disposable, low-quality print made by pressing a couple of buttons.
It is an honest effort, because the prints that are being created with the current generation of wide-colour gamut inkjet printers fitted with pigment inks on fine art papers are some of the most long-lasting, beautiful and carefully crafted prints that have ever been made and deserve to be recognised and titled as unique objects.
Why the title matters
I would argue that the title matters more for digital prints then it does for other mediums like painting because with digital printing there is such a vast range of different levels of quality (and longevity) available. It's important for the viewer or potential buyer to immediately know what it is that they are looking at. For sure, it's easy to recognise a print made on plain photocopy paper using a cheap office printer. But it is also entirely possible to produce impressive looking digital prints using fugitive (and cheap) solvent or dye inks on an inexpensive (and acid-rich) media. The print might look great initially, but will not last. The inks will begin to fade and the media begin to deteriorate, probably within single digit years. So there does need to be clarity of the difference between digital prints made with materials not intended to be long-lasting and prints made with materials that can be accurately described as 'archival-quality'.
In the same way, a film negative produced by a plastic disposable camera is, in the broadest terms, the same thing as a film negative produced by a Hasselblad 500. But in reality they are wildly different objects and should be understood as such.
So the descriptive title or term for a digital inkjet print is perhaps more important then titles for other mediums.
Towards a standard naming convention
As mentioned above, it will no doubt take time for a universally accepted convention to solidify. Its important to create a term that is accurate and descriptive.
So, back to the original question as to what to call these prints, maybe its best to start with what not to call them.....
Giclée ? Say what?
"Giclée" is a word that was created by the very early adopters of inkjet print technology. The intention was to create a term to describe a long-lasting, fine art print made with an inkjet printer. It is derived from gicleur, the French term for a jet or a nozzle, and the associated verb gicler (to squirt or spray). It's pronounced 'ghee-klay' - similar to the French name Jacques. It was created in about 1991, at Nash Editions, who were one of the first print studios to adopt digital inkjet technology. At that point Nash Editions were using a modified Iris printer, an early predecessor of modern fine art inkjet printers. The Iris printer was originally intended to produce short-lived colour proofs for pre-press commercial environments. So Nash Editions member Jack Duganne came up with the word Giclée as a distinguished sounding term which would separate the fine art prints being made by Nash Editions from the commercial colour-proofs normally produced by the Iris. (For more on this have a look at previous post "A Short History of Digital Fine Art Printing")
But the inventors of the term soon abandoned it and publicly distanced themselves from the term. You will not find it on the Nash Editions website
And many (maybe most?) printers and 'experts' would today argue against it's use, based on the fact that it was originally intended to apply to an Iris print, and that in some quarters it is felt to be vague and pretentious, as some comments from a recent discussion on one of the forums will illustrate....
"Giclee is a BS term"
"it sounds affected"
"the awful term Giclee"
"it's marketing speak"
"a pretentious weezle word"
"it's also vulgar French slang for male ejaculation"
Having said that, the term is still popular and it certainly has its adherents. It does serve the important function of offering a short-hand signifier of a fine-art quality digital print. Its popularity is interestingly geographical, with a lot of the major UK print studios still using it while most of the North American studios and printers appear to have abandoned it.
Personally I would argue against the term based on the fact that it's vague and ill-defined. Can we describe a print made with dye or solvent inks as a Giclée print? Why not. What's to stop someone, who doesn't know better, innocently using the term to describe a digital print that looks great but is actually made using fugitive inks on a acid-rich medium. If there is no clear definition of what constitutes a Giclée print, what's to stop someone describing any digital print as Giclée print?
So if not 'Giclée' then what?
Let's ask the big girls and boys
The V&A Museum in London (vam.ac.uk) has a useful guide to photographic print processes which uses the term 'Pigment print' for digital inkjet prints. Access the guide here (link)
The Museum of Modern Art (moma.org) and The Metropolitan Museum of Art (metmuseum.org) use either 'Inkjet Print', as in this example (link), or this example (link), or 'Pigmented Inkjet Print' (link) or 'Pigment inkjet print on paper' (link) or 'Inkjet pigment print' (link).
The Museum of Contemporary Art in LA (moca.org) also uses 'Inkjet Print'.
The Tate Modern (ww.tate.org.uk) uses 'Inkjet Print on Paper' (link) or 'Archival Pigment Print' (link) while the International Center of Photography (icp.org) goes with 'Pigment Ink' (link) or 'Digital Inkjet' (link).
So what we can take away from this is that, firstly, the words 'digital' and 'inkjet' are nothing to be afraid of and, secondly, even the worlds leading institutions don't quite know what term to use!
But what about out "in the wild"?
Museums and institutions are rarefied and insular places where perhaps the normal rules of the open market don't apply. Its fine for a big museum to simply describe a print as an 'Inkjet Print'. Its nice and neat and concise. But I would be willing to bet that the description on their internal catalogue includes details of ink and paper used, along with the provenance and so on. Certainly, when I have printed work for institutions, they have been careful about being supplied with the 'technical' details of ink and paper and process.
Maybe a better reference point for artists and photographers and printers is the real world of the open market, starting with the big galleries and collectors
For example, The Goodman Gallery uses either 'Digital print in pigment inks on cotton rag paper' for David Goldblatt's digital prints (link) or elsewhere also 'Inkjet print on cotton rag paper'.
The Stevenson Gallery uses 'Archival pigment print' (link) for the digital prints on the current (till June 2023) Guy Tillim exhibition (link)
The Walther Collection in Germany (walthercollection.com/en) is one of the worlds largest collectors of photographic prints. It also uses a variety of terms but the most frequently used is 'Archival pigment ink on cotton rag paper' (link) and (link)
What about brand names?
It is not uncommon to see screen prints and etchings which include brand names ("Screen print on BFK Rives 250gsm") in the title. Equally I often see digital inkjet prints which include brand names ("Pigment inks on Hahnemeuhle etching paper 310gsm"). I have been told that curators and collectors want as much information about the piece as possible and that the characteristics of the paper are an essential part of the work. I am not convinced, personally, and I would recommend against using brand names. I don't think I have ever seen something titled "Winsor and Newton oil paint on canvas" for example. My personal preference would be to include a description of the paper ("cotton rag" or "baryta" for example) and leave it at that. Seems more timeless, neater, less rooted in a particular moment.
No But Really, What Do I Call My Print!?
If you are still reading at this point, what is clear from the above is that there is not one single, universally accepted, correct term. We are free to use whatever we want (maybe), but I would always suggest using a descriptive term that gives the viewer enough detail to understand what she is looking at and that clarifies the longevity that results from using archival-quality materials
I would recommend against the term Giclée and I would recommend against using brand names. And equally I would advise against something as pared down as 'Digital Inkjet', because it is too general and could refer to a range of print processes and materials when used in the open market.
My preferred naming convention for fine art inkjet prints would always include the ink type used ('pigment' or 'carbon' at Print Art) and would then include the media type. For example....
"Archival pigment ink on cotton rag" for prints on 100% cotton paper
"Archival pigment ink on baryta" for prints on baryta paper
"Archival pigment ink on fine art paper" for prints on fibre paper (acid-free wood pulp paper)
"Archival carbon ink on ...." for prints made with Piezography inks
And so on....
But is it Really Archival?
And a final note about the word archival, which is another source of much debate....some would argue against using the word because, again, there is no universal, widely accepted agreement of what 'archival' really means. 20 years? 100 years? Stored in archival box in a climate-controlled facility? Or hanging on the wall in my living room?
Paper and ink manufacturers happily throw the word around with gay abandon, without any proper criteria of actually what it means in the real world.
But for now I would include the word 'archival' in the description, under the understanding that what it really means is 'archival-quality' or 'has the possibility of being archival when handled and stored correctly'
But this is a discussion for the next blog and another day.