I started working with digital images in 1993. Soon I´ve discovered all the amazing possibilities to create images with the help of computer hardware and software. Although it took me some years before I´ve created something that I thought was good enough.
My problem than was; How to get the image out of the computer? To present the image on the Internet or on a screen wasn´t the problem. But if I wanted to present it in a more traditional way, behind glass in a frame for instance, than it was more difficult. Not because of the printers printing quality, but because the poor quality of the ink. The printout could look as good as a high quality photo, but after a week or two in sunlight exposure there wasn´t much left of the original colours.

Than some years ago, the first consumer product with pigmented ink cartridges, was on the market. Today there is a quite big variety of these kind of pigmented inks, that guarantees light and colour resistant from 35 - 200 years.
So for me this was important. Now I´ve could print out my digital images on high quality cotton printing paper and also present them as a work of art to the public.

When I first showed my digital images in an exhibition I had some problems with what to call the technique. Since many artists working with digital images, there already was a lot of different names used for this technique, but none of them was relevant enough I thought.
For many years I´ve worked as a printmaker with all the traditional techniques, as lithography, etching, drypoint, silk-screen etc.
The word Lithography for instance comes from the Greek words Lithos=stone and Graphein=to write. As a logical consequence of this I thought I call this digital technique DIGIGRAPHY, where digi is (off course) short for digital.

Many people think that it´s a very fast way of making images on a computer, maybe it is for someone, but not for me. I´ve realised it takes me even more time to create a digital image that I´m satisfied with, than to paint an oil painting. Almost all of my Digigraphies are made from material that I´ve scanned from my paintings (sometimes combined with photographic material) and than rearranged in to new images, also off course, using a lot of the computer software possibilities.

My "Digigraphies" are all printed out with light-proof and colour resistant inks. The bigger ones with a HP large size printer and the smaller with an Epson Stylus Photo 2100.

Read more about pigmented inks: http://www.wilhelm-research.com/

Jan Dahlqvist, January 2003