Digitalization and manipulation of still photographs is now taken for granted in the visual media as well as the need to think in terms of photographic information, rather than the photograph as raw evidence. The “document” is in reality a text or an argument now that the image is basically data in flux.

In her Image Simulations, Computer Manipulations: Some Considerations essay in Decoys and disruptions: selected writings, 1975-2001 Martha Rosler says that:

art photography perpetually defines itself by stressing its distance from the recording apparatus; it often does so by relying on arcane theories of vision and on manipulation of the print, more recently on conceptual or critical-theoretical grounding. In the eyes of professional photographers, this no doubt makes them skill-less charlatans, loose cannons who get rich by fleecing the public. Such professional photographers, fixing their horizon at the level of copyright, are in no position to see that artists’ motivations for appropriating photojournalistic and other workaday photographic images are not so far from their own fears of manipulation; the difference, of course, is that the artists see commercial photography and photojournalism as deeply implicated in the processes of social manipulation while the producers of the images are more likely to see themselves as at the mercy of those who control the process. Autonomy for each is the underlying theme.