In the Introduction to Photography Crisis of History the editor Joan Fontcuberta writes that photography arrived at the year 2000 beset by an apparent crisis of identity:

The vertiginous technological changes all around us, together with the political and economic context that underpins these, have transformed the genesis and the nature of the photographic image to such an extent as to legitimate every uncertainty as to its current status....The whole ethical and aesthetic basis has been subverted.The landscape is decidedly unrecognizable, so unrecognizable that some, the most radical are now speaking of the death of photography, whole others, more moderate, introduce a new and necessary ambiguous category: that of post-photography.

I have to admit being initially puzzled by this kind of commentary since I found that the shift to digital makes it easier and cheaper to do photography. Digital technology is liberating in that it opens up spaces that enable a public presence to work that was never there in a pre-digital world --eg., photoblogs, e-books and magazines, digital exhibitions etc.

However, Fontcuberta is referring to the whole framework that provided photography with its cultural, instrumental and historical context. This is described thus:

In photography two facets have necessarily coexisted, perfectly fused and inseparable: on the one hand, the image as visual information; on the other, the physical support or medium, its objective dimension ..... all through the course of history certain social uses or certain focuses have privileged one component or the other; in the realm of the archive, for example, the information aspect prevails, while in that of the museum, in contrast, it is the objective aspect. What digital technology does is to accentuate the divide between image and support,between information and object. To say it in other words, digital technology has effectively dematerialized photography, situating it in new configuration that will prohibit its access to certain past territories and promote the exploration others.