This is the introduction to the book.
The impact of digital technology on photography was initially seen in the 1990s as a threat to, and a undermining of, the practical tradition of visual representation of the photographic. This was usually expressed in terms of the death of photography, the loss of the real, and the emergence of the post-photographic age.
This kind of understanding signified both a sense of the displacement of photographic practice by the use of digital technology and a sense of epochal change in our visual culture. Digital imagery meant new ways of seeing based on a freedom from the inherent constraints of automatism and realism that tied the analogue photographer to being a mere recorder of reality--a mirror held up to the world. The duality between the photography and the digital image is stark and it is understood in terms of technological means of production.
