In the past few years, we've finally started to see it happen: standard personal computers are now capable of displaying photo-realistic color images, PhotoCD processing provides an inexpensive means for digitizing slides and photographs, and libraries of digitized art history images are finally becoming available on CD and via the internet. The available web sites, some of which have extensive collections of art images, tend to be slow and unreliable; although useful for identifications, they offer little chance to study details.

Rhyne has focused on an alternative approach better suited to instruction at Reed: he produces his own digital images specially tailored to his courses. During the fall semester of his introductory art history class, Rhyne identified two assignments for which digital images would offer particular advantages: a pair of seventeenth-century Japanese screens and a group of three crest, or totem, poles.

The Japanese screens, portraying the arrival of the Portuguese in Japan, each contain six vertical panels depicting many people in a variety of activities. The students were first given an assignment to go down to the Portland Art Museum and study the screens. Only after they had written papers about the screens did the students study the digital images that Rhyne had prepared--a total of 64 images showing overviews and details of both screens. This approach let the students develop a general familiarity with the screens, and then take all the time they wanted, in a relaxed setting, to study the details more intensively.

Given the course's focus on methods of art history analysis, Rhyne asked the students to think about what they could learn from studying the computer images, compared to what they had learned from the original work of art. Several students went back down to the museum so they were able to get a natural "play off" between the originals and the digital reproductions. For Rachel Perkins '99, viewing the originals elicited a generalized, even emotional, feeling for the work, while the digital images were "incomparable" for really analyzing the screens in detail. Paradoxically, viewing the digital reproductions is in some ways more intimate than viewing the originals.

The second assignment involved a group of three crest poles, Three Variations on Killer Whale Myth, carved by Haida artist Robert Davidson. The poles are located in the PepsiCo Sculpture Park in Purchase, New York, so the class had no opportunity to view the original works. Students were able to read about the poles, but there are very few illustrations of the works available and none in color, one of the key features of crest poles.

In this case, digital images offered very clear advantages: without them, students would not have been able to study the poles at all. The two-monitor system works well for this type of comparative analysis. Lacking exposure to the originals, students can look at overviews on one screen and corresponding details on the other. In addition, the wide variety of detailed images that Rhyne could provide on the computer are clearly consistent with the artist's intent. "The person who discovers the undercut wants to look further, and I like to bring the viewer into the image to discover more things," said Davidson.

Rhyne's use of the computer for exploration of the Japanese screens and Haida crest poles illustrates how digital images can be much more than mere substitutes for the original work. Digital reproductions, if created from high-quality photographs with a mind toward scholarly uses, can truly enhance the study of art history.