The advent of the image-oriented computer in the mid-1980s is having a radical effect on the central place of photography in visual culture. This new technology of images changes the ways in which we encounter and use images in everyday life: in advertising, entertainment, news, evidence.

The changes are so great that many talk in terms of the ‘death of photography’ and the birth of a post-photographic culture. This is the story of how the image has now progressed from the age of its mechanical production to that of its digital origination and replication. For William Mitchell it is the story of how new technologies have provided ‘a welcome opportunity to expose the aporias in photography’s construction of the visual world, to deconstruct the very ideas of photographic objectivity and closure, and to resist what has become an increasingly sclerotic pictorial tradition.'

The notion of techno-cultural revolution has been widely accepted and celebrated by cultural critics and practitioners. It is widely accepted that the very idea of photographic veracity is being radically challenged by the emerging technology of digital image manipulation and synthesis. Photographs can now be altered at will in ways that are virtually undetectable and photorealistic synthesized images are becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish from actual photographs.

Photographs were once ‘comfortably regarded as causally generated truthful reports about things in the real world’, and it has convinced us of how unsophisticated we were in such a regard. It has convincingly argued that ‘the emergence of digital imaging has irrevocably subverted these certainties, forcing us to adopt a far more wary and more vigilant interpretive stance’