Richard Benson is the former Dean of the Yale School of Art and an expert in photographic reproduction in book form. His resumé includes the monumental four volume The Work of Atget and many of Lee Friedlander's books. The Printed Picture is an erudite and witty survey of the entire history of pictorial printing processes, from 15th century woodcuts to the latest digital methods. Benson's organizing principle is that the physical and æsthetic characteristics of a given printing method constrain and modify the meaning of the image reproduced by it.

He is a large-format photographer and a master printer and he earned his money as a printer and teaching at Yale.

Though printing techniques have improved with digital improved techniques do not mean that people will make better pictures. There is still the matter of content, what a picture has to express, to give. In this interview he says:

If you get interested in the making more than in the thing you're making does then you're becoming a craftsman. And a craftsman is fine but an artist is a different creature.The worst possible thing you can do is to waste your energy trying to get all the little tiny bits and pieces right because when you get all those right the important things are wrong. So whenever I make something I just try to get the big issues roughly correct. I have no interest in getting the little things all precise. I don't really care if the thing is in register on press, I could care less. I don't care if there's a hickey. I care if they're not running enough ink because that's the thing that controls how the picture looks. I care if they plated it badly and it gets flat. So my notion about craft is it's a total waste of time to be chasing some notion of perfection when what we should be making is a roughly made object that serves its purpose well. I want it to carry out it's intent.