A long time ago I read a New Yorker profile of a master photographic printer called Richard Benson. It was titled, with that deliberate matter-of-factness that New Yorker titles invariably have, "A single person making a single thing". This man was a unique craftsman, who great photographers and great institutions turned to when they wanted their pictures printed better than ever before. He had printed photographs by Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand and Lee Friedlander, as well as three volumes of the works of great French photographer Eugène Atget for the Museum of Modern Art. He had made an unsurpassed volume of prints for the collector Howard Gilman, whose collection is now part of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. And in 1986 Benson had been awarded a MacArthur Foundation grant worth nearly quarter of a million dollars to carry on doing what he did so well.

From the description, Benson appeared a remarkably down-to-earth character, who wore dungarees and drove a customised 1930 Model A Ford sedan that could do 75 mph. He had given up university because he wanted to work with his hands. He said things like : "Photography is full of people who have other people do the work. Photography is the only medium where you hardly have to do anything anyway, and here they go and get somebody to do the darkroom work. It's comical."

The giveaway word there is "darkroom". When I looked up the piece, it was written in 1990, and in the intervening years the photographic darkroom has become more or less obsolete, except for a few people like Benson, who continue to work in both analogue and digital . Since then, Benson, who began teaching at Yale in 1979, had been dean of the School of Art, between 1996 and 2006. Now an exhibition devoted to his work, and his teaching, is showing at the Museum of Modern Art in New York until the end of May.

A book accompanies the show, and it is this volume – somewhere between a primer and a history book – that gives such a clear idea of Benson and his firmly held beliefs. The Printed Picture (published by MoMA but available in the UK), is an attractive, learned, clearly written and sometimes humorous account of the evolution of the printed still image, and is about as far from one of those ponderous "how-to" photography books as it's possible to get.

One of the assumptions people often make, if you enjoy photography, is that you a) must take pictures of your own, and b) that you understand the technical processes that underpin the making of photographic prints. I don't do the former and know far too little about the latter, and at the outset I was a rather reluctant student of this book. However, the format – lovely images, quiet texts, no complicated diagrams – was quickly persuasive. By way of introduction, Benson writes: "This book grows out of a series of lectures given at Yale University over the last 30 years. Each time I gave one it was different, according to the prints I hung on the wall that day. The following pages still retain the tone of a lecture being delivered in the first person."

And so they do: they move in 12 chapters from cave painting and relief printing (a woodblock) to digital processes (laser prints, iris prints, modern inkjet printing and chromogenic prints). In between Benson explains pre-photographic techniques, early photography, early colour printing, modern photographic prints, mechanical commercial printing, the typewriter, the 35mm colour slide ("For me there is no more excruciating event than looking at the family slides") and a section explaining the theory of colour printing.

What really distinguishes his account, however, is the choice of illustrations. An entire alternative history of photography is here: no "greatest hits", rather a series of individual images, many of them anonymous, from Benson's personal collection. When he opts to show an example of early colour stencil printing, for example, he chooses a charming double-page spread of red roses from a seed catalogue published in 1900; and for an example of hand-colouring, a beautiful picture of Chinese children carrying babies on their backs, also from 1900. Sometimes Benson uses images that have some personal significance. For the example of a daguerreotype, the early process that captured an image on silvered copper plate, he uses a portrait of a mother and two children, one of which is his maternal great-grandmother, Abby Sophia Greene, born in 1844. When he talks about colour Polaroid prints, he uses a snapshot of his daughter, Abby Sophia Benson, born in 1975. In addition to these anonymous images, there are others by famous photographers of Benson's acquaintance: a still-life, taken and printed by Irving Penn; a picture of Josef Koudelka's "bed" – the outdoor mat on which he slept for years while he was travelling and taking photographs; a series of large-format colour Polaroid prints by Robert Frank, made with a 20in x 24in camera which he'd been given in the 1980s; as well as some of the fine, sombre studies of industrial machinery and architecture that are Benson's own.

Despite the forward trajectory of the text, he barely attempts to disguise his love for, and faith in, the old ways. More than once he disdains the power of advertising that was responsible for bringing colour printing to the fore. And although he has a good deal of praise for the modern digital print, which he tells us is far better than anything that has gone before it, he still has his eye on an old-fashioned colour printing press for his basement workshop.

In the future, he believes, we will see the end of direct human involvement in picture-making, as digital technology becomes ever more sophisticated. The example that Benson identifies is that of the barcode: an early, crude picture that can be made by a machine and read by a machine. Gradually, he suggests, the "human being … will start to slip out of the big picture and begin to take on a role in the background, planning and directing the show, but no longer the central actor on the stage."

The truth is that for some artists, this is already happening. Their images are manufactured, manipulated, recorded, broadcast, screened and stored. The nearest the human hand gets to them is the computer keyboard.

• The Printed Picture is at the Edward Steichen photography galleries, MoMA, New York, until 1 June 2009