Photographers make photographs, right? It’s obvious. And we all regularly share and view images, even as the technology underpinning the craft has changed. But what makes a photograph a “finished” product that we can put out into the world?
Creative work rarely travels in a straight line from start to finish, and photography is no exception. The process of making an image often reveals how fluid the boundary is between the act of creating and the product that results. In that sense, photographs aren’t generally finished when the shutter clicks—or even after editing or printing. This is especially true in the digital age, where images can easily be versioned, revisited, and reinterpreted over time. The photograph may become more like a checkpoint in an ongoing process rather than a static endpoint. And whether the medium is analog or digital, how we define a photograph as “finished” depends as much on intent and context as it does on output.
Film Photography
With film, a photograph doesn’t fully exist at the moment of capture. The exposure creates a latent image on the negative, but that’s just the beginning. To move from exposure to photograph, the film must be developed—a stage that’s both technical and creative. The choice of developer, the timing, temperature, and even agitation style all influence the negative’s final look. Techniques like push or pull processing can drastically shift contrast and mood. Developing isn’t just a mechanical step; it’s the moment when the photographer begins to shape the captured image according to their intent.
Even once developed, the negative is not a finished product. It’s an intermediate object—an incomplete version of the image, one that still needs interpretation to be fully realized. It assumes there will be more work to come. Its true potential is only revealed in the darkroom, where decisions about light, paper, and time coalesce into a final image. Unlike digital files, which have the potential to be shared instantly or treated as complete, film negatives live in a state of creative suspension until they’re printed.
And printing itself is anything but neutral. Each print from a negative can differ, depending on how it’s handled—contrast adjustments, dodging, burning, paper choice, and toning all bring nuance to the final result. Printing is the final act of interpretation, and one that often feels more like a performance than reproduction. Even skilled printers rarely produce two prints that feel exactly the same. Each is an artifact of creative intent filtered through technique and a particular moment.
Few photographers embodied this process more fully than Ansel Adams. While his iconic images are often associated with pristine landscapes and careful compositions, his work was also set apart by his mastery of the darkroom. Adams considered the negative to be like a musical score—full of potential but needing a performance to come to life. The print, to him, was that performance: deliberate, expressive, and capable of evolving over time.
Digital Photography
Digital photography has the ability to collapse many of those steps. If you’re shooting JPEG, the camera can produce a finished photo the instant after the shutter closes. There’s a kind of immediacy that’s appealing—capture and completion rolled into one motion.
But most digital photographers shoot raw and edit afterward. In this case, the photograph doesn’t really take shape until it’s processed. Once edited, a digital image can be printed consistently and identically, many times over, and even years later. This stability comes from color management systems, ICC profiles, and controlled workflows that maintain consistency across printers and screens. In contrast to film, where each print is likely to introduce new variables, digital output allows photographers to lock in a look and replicate it without variation.
That said, editing is always reversible. The base raw file remains essentially untouched; the edits applied to produce the final image can be changed at any point. So while a digital image may offer permanence once edited, that stability is deceptive. In a strange way, the photograph becomes both more stable as a product and more open-ended as a process. You can make the same print a hundred times, exactly the same—but you can also revisit the edit and change the entire feel of the photo. Multiple versions can easily coexist, with any of them printed at any point. “Finished” becomes a matter of decision, not limitation.
Sharing Photographs
A common outcome of the photographic process is sharing images with others. By necessity, this used to require printing. There was no other way to put a photograph in front of someone’s eyes. But that’s changed. Today, prints are no longer essential to the photographic process. Most photographs live digitally now—shared through apps, displayed on screens, or passed along through cloud folders and email. We scroll through our own images more often on phones than in albums. Even film often gets scanned and folded into this digital ecosystem.
So while printing is still an option, it’s no longer a necessity. The digital image is now the default medium of exchange and viewing. A photograph can have reach and relevance without ever existing as a physical object.
Final Thoughts
So, do photographs need to be printed? The short answer is no. Digital technology has redefined the process and the product. A photograph today can be finished and shared without ever touching paper.
But that doesn’t mean printing is obsolete. There’s something to be said for removing images from the distraction-heavy environment of screens. A printed photograph demands more of our attention and offers a different kind of experience—quiet, immersive, tactile. And for photographers, creating a book or curating a physical exhibit introduces a level of intentionality and control that’s hard to replicate online. It allows for storytelling across multiple images, guided not by algorithms, but by the photographer’s own sense of flow and narrative.
As Walter Benjamin observed nearly a century ago, mechanical reproduction changes how we experience art. Digital images, endlessly shareable and perfectly replicable, are accessible in ways film prints never were—but they often lack the aura of uniqueness that a hand-crafted object can carry. That doesn’t diminish their value, but it does reframe how we understand the photograph as both artifact and experience.
In the end, while printing is no longer necessary to complete a photograph, it remains one of the most powerful ways to elevate and contextualize the work. It's less about necessity and more about depth. A photograph can exist without paper—but sometimes, it sings louder with it.
Does printing figure prominently in your photography? When do you consider a photograph to be finished?
The subject of printing comes up every so often, so to those who recognize my name and comments, I’m undoubtedly sounding like a broken record… although that expression might not mean anything to those who were born in the digital age of music. It refers back to vinyl records where a scratch or damaged groove would cause the song to repeat, over and over, until you moved the needle. The idiom implies that the comments are tiresome and annoying.
So at the risk of repeating myself, printing is a particular passion of mine, as much or more than clicking the camera shutter or computer photo editing parts of photography. I don’t print every picture, obviously, because a lot of pictures are simply not very special or interesting. But I use printing as the barometer of whether I think my picture is good. If it’s good in my opinion and I really like it, I print it. Notice I did not say that I use public opinion to decide whether my picture is good enough to print. Virtually anything posted to social media will look awesome and stunning and fantastic to a lot of people. I like certain types of images that the public generally does not. I print to please me, not anyone else. Printing will hold you to a higher standard because a lot of flaws that hide in a small picture, as viewed on an iPhone, will be glaringly exposed on paper. Prints are more to my liking for appreciating details and exploring all the nooks and crannies of a photo… the elements of photography that make it a unique art form. It bothers me when folks say that the only purpose for making a print is to put it on a wall. Photography is meant to be examined closely. I make no apologies for pixel-peeping. I have clamshell boxes to store my prints, as well as my paper of choice which is 17 x 22 and comes in boxes of 25 sheets, solving the problem of how to store them. They go on shelves in the closet along with binders and archival sleeves holding old family pictures, some of which are over a hundred years old.
I would never go so far as to claim unequivocally that an image is not complete until printed, since we’re all different people and we live in a decidedly digital age. Other people seem to derive the same sense of satisfaction from viewing their photos on a huge TV monitor. But if I make a good picture, I want to sit and hold it in my hands and appreciate it in that manner. It can be kind of a meditative experience getting lost in the subtle transition of tones. I also much prefer to make my own prints. There’s simply no way that an outside lab will get it the way you expect every time. It will certainly be good, and good enough to sell, but a lab’s print is not my print, and printing is an art form unto itself. In an era dominated by ideas and services, and fast food and imported everything, it’s nice to be able to say that I made something that will last a lifetime.
Thanks for the comment Ed Kunzelman! I'm curious -- do you revisit any of the photos you don't print, maybe inspecting them on a monitor or other device in a way similar to how you take in one of your prints? Do you consider them to be finished photos in the same way as your printed photos?
Hi Adam. Thanks for asking. Yes I revisit old digital photos. I'm nostalgic at heart for about everything I've saved over the years. I've read a few books two or three times. I don't keep every last photo though that I've ever taken, and I don't keep adjustment layers with the idea in mind that I would go back and edit them differently. I make my decisions for how I want to process the photo and I'm done with it. Yes I consider it finished as a digital-only image. Maybe not in the same way as a print because even an old print can still arouse far greater emotions than a new or old digital image, otherwise I probably wouldn't have printed it in the first place. I keep a lot of digital images though because it's so easy to do. In fact, it's quite a bit of work culling the herd of old photos. Some photographers talk like it's a badge of honor to have multiple hard drives full of hundreds of thousands of pictures. I can't stand the clutter. I just looked at my one and only internal hard drive and I have 6,550 images which use 360gb of disc space. That represents 22 years of photos since I bought my first digital camera in 2003. Deleting old photos is typically a good wintertime project.
Thanks for sharing Ed! It makes sense to me that your printed photos would elicit a stronger emotion for you than digital ones, given how you described your printing process. I also appreciate your point of view of processing digital photos the way you want to, and then being done. While non-destructive editing is wonderful, it feels like it can sometimes lead to the idea that one should go back and tweak specific aspects.