Gary, you are right digital has opened up areas that were closed to people like ourselves before digital. Look at the explosion of self publishing.

For me however digital and the 'network' go hand in hand, this is why I am interested in phone camera photography, essentially a phone is small computer in one's pocket, permanently connected to potentially millions of other users across the globe.

There are quite a few artists that create fantasy worlds with the digital technology. I can't think of an equivalent to this type of work in the analogue age.
Darkroom manipulation could do a lot but not as much as photoshop can achieve.
example
The challenge would be to find examples of this work that is less "Disney" in outlook and more original.

Barbara
another example?

s2,
you are probably right about digital and network. Aren't the sales of digital cameras declining as those of smart phones (with cameras + network connection) increasing? That would mean that the smart phone is today's equivalent of the Kodak box brownie.

"digital has opened up areas that were closed to people like ourselves before digital."

In the 1980s--prior to digital--photographers could either exhibit or publish monographs. Most were excluded by the gatekeepers--the art galleries and publishers--so little of the prints done in the darkroom was seen publicly.

Barbara
re the interesting Flickr work of Mattjin Franssen that you linked to.

Colberg does say:

Let’s be very clear here: Manipulating images on the computer is not new. It’s not revolutionary. Photographers have manipulated photographs in the darkroom for hundreds of years, and the first composites of sets of negatives date from the 1800s. Digital makes it easier, but it’s nothing new.

It would appear that Mattjin Franssen's images would be seen as examples of manipulation by Colberg. This work doesn't break new ground in the way that electronic music did in the world of music.

Another example

I'm not sure what kind of work Colberg has in mind when he says that by the new he means that digital photography is doing things that analog photography cannot do.

s2 art says:
" digital has opened up areas that were closed to people like ourselves before digital. Look at the explosion of self publishing."

Going back to the old negatives from the chemical darkroom days on the weekend and scanning them--made me realize why I'd gave up photography.

I kept on taking photos, processing the negatives, doing contact sheets and making printing, then putting the prints in a draw. There was no where to go. It was a closed world re galleries and books. So I just gave up and went and did a doctorate at Flinders university.

Gary said: "That would mean that the smart phone is today's equivalent of the Kodak box brownie."

Yes Gary, however even as I try to experiment with my Phone camera and interfaces like instagram and somehow try and make the images different I feel I'm still grasping at straws, not to mention being drowned about by all the 'noise'. For example the idea of something new as expressed by Robert Adams in his essay on 'Making Art New' is an amplified by the digital revolution of photography on the internet.

s2says.
From what I remember of Adams' 'Making Art New'' essay he criticizes the tendency of the art market to promote faddishness and, more controversially, disputes the idea of progress in art.

Form for Adams is the central point of art and Form (in life) is the container of universal Truth and Beauty. So it is ahistorical. Styles change and style is never important by itself.

I don't buy the ahistorical Form bit at all. It's far too Platonist for me. My position is that forms of life change through and with history. That gives a different account of the new since there are different forms of life. Thus a digital world is a different form of life to a pre-digital one.