As is well known the modernist art critic and theorist Clement Greenberg held that a particular medium has to be defined on the basis of its own features (which are unique to its nature), hybrid images belong to the category of the ‘post-medium’ which puts into crisis the very idea of medium specificity.

From this perspective, hybrid images--eg., digital crossovers between film and photography in artworks----are seen as a symptom of a crisis of the modernist understanding of the medium of photography or even photography's obsolescence in so far as video technology takes over its most significant characteristics and functions.

In Photo-filmic images in contemporary visual culture in Philosophy of Photography (Vol.1 No. 1) Alexander Streitberger and Hilde Van Gelder say that:

Over the last two decades studies on the interaction between the photographic and the filmic image became increasingly popular. This new orientation is partially based on the insight that the ontological difference between film and photography, usually claimed by scholars of photography theory and film studies up to the 1990s, no longer holds in the digital era. With the advent of digital technology, the boundaries between the photographic and the filmic image are constantly blurred, both technically – in drawing on the same software and hardware engineering – and perceptively – in leaving the spectator in doubt of the (photographic or filmic) nature of the image.