Earlier this year, Graham Nash and his business partner, printmaker Mac Holbert, were the recipients of the PhotoImaging Manufacturers & Distributors Association Visionary Award. Co-founded in 1989 by Holbert and Nash, Nash Editions is widely regarded as having started a photographic revolution with its invention of digital fine-art printing.

The Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History recently acquired the original Nash Editions Iris 3047 printer, on which the pair began experimenting with...