The post-photography emerged in the late 1980s as a result of the emergence of digital technology.
Digital technology has allowed for the image to be severed from its referent, re-contextualized and re-presented. The theory goes that notions of representational truth in photography have well and truly been destroyed in light of technology that recasts the image as a fluid entity. The emergence of new digital technologies has undercut our trust in the photograph, which more than any other kind of image as faithfully documenting the reality of the material world. We have relied on it to describe places, to prove things existed, and to recall the memorable. This confidence we have warranted in traditional photography, was irrecoverably shattered by the emergence of new digital technologies --hence the concern over the ‘loss of the real’.
However it was not the digital camera that gave birth to the post-photographic, it was the scanner as digital cameras have only become sophisticated enough to be taken seriously in the last decade. In the 1990s scanners were generally used to digitize portions of chemically processed images that were then manipulated and assembled in Photoshop. The combination of this hardware and software meant that artists were almost forced to supplement montage for traditional straight photography that depended upon the indexical power of photos. It is this technology and workflow, and not digital photography per se, that was the condition for the emergence of the post-photographic.