The 40th Rencontres d'Arles, which is one of the world's leading photography festivals, recognises that digital photography has widened the photographer’s palette. The fast and loose approach by a new generation of digital artists is one of the dominant themes of this year's Rencontres.

It recognizes that the growth of the Internet and the proliferation of sites for searching out and/or sharing images online—Flickr, Photobucket, Facebook, Google Images--mean a plethora of visual resources that was inconceivable as little as ten years ago. It means image accessibility, an upgrading of the amateur at the expense of the auteur and the obsoleteness of the modernist criteria which were once the crucial factors in determining what was art and what wasn’t.

What this suggests is that Web 2.0 influencing contemporary photo culture around the world by connecting international audiences to art experiences, enabling the discovery of new work and presenting never-before-seen channels of expression and communication.” Blogs, webzines and now social networks have made photography far more accessible than before. We are no longer dependent on museums, galleries and books for photographic content. This not only makes it cheaper and easier to get our hands on photographs, but we can now see far more images than are available through these ‘traditional’ forms.

Eye Curious warns us of the danger of Web 2:

it can lead to a situation where we are constantly consuming and never digesting. The danger with the infinite accessibility of the web is that we can find ourselves only looking at photographs that are immediately seductive or simply popular in the networks around us. Work that might be deemed quiet, challenging or even just off-putting can get totally bypassed.