If one looks back at the brief history of digital photography it becomes very clear that the issues that bothered critics and historians twenty years ago are significantly different from the questions we may need to ask now. For many scholars, the most pressing issues were those concerning the digital image’s ability to represent the Real The malleability of digital photographs was then seen by many as the central element of the digital revolution and caused some to herald the ‘‘death of photography’’, shattering the privileged status of the photograph as ‘‘objective’’ truth.

Today, the low-resolution, pixilated appearance of early camera phone photographs and video clips is now an accepted part of the syntax of truthful and authentic reportage in the same way that the grainy black and white photograph once was. The speed with which these highly compressed JPEGs are transmitted and amalgamated into news media is an indication of the acceptance of the explicitly digital image into the structure of news reporting while emergent practices such as citizen journalism and sousveillance rely on the instant distribution that the networked camera facilitates.

The mass-amateurization of photography, and its renewed visibility online signals a shift in the valorization of photographic culture. If, in the past, the arena of public photography was dominated by professional practitioners, currently the work of specialists is appearing side by side with images produced by individuals who don’t have the same professional investment in photography. As a result, the roles of the professional photographic image and that of a snapshot are changing.