of images, the differences between high and low, between mastery and dilettantism, between gifted eye and merely ‹aiming› will become blurred; differences that have marked quality within the field of photography. Beyond this, the media difference between still and moving image becomes blurred if pictures and movies can be both created and viewed with a single piece of equipment.

Authenticity and a reference to reality also continue to play a fundamental role in artistic photography. However, at the same time documentary movements such as topographic photography regard themselves as a critical reflection of the naive belief in the immediacy of photographic realism. Documentary work is a question of attitude—towards the object being examined and in the analysis of one's own perspective—and not one of technology. The switch to digital media will no doubt transform the practices, the aesthetics, and the forms of presenting documentary photography, but not the documentary agenda as such.

Recognition of photodocumentation as an artistic movement is a comparatively late development in the

history of photography; in the beginning photography, which wanted to be regarded as art, relied on setting a stage in front of the camera and later processing the image in the laboratory. Fantasies were lent visual credibility by means of photographic rhetoric; staging and post-processing, on the other hand, allowed photographs to develop into an allegorical reality. Electronic image processing has vastly expanded the spectrum of possible intervention in the photographic image. The text by Anette Hüsch, «Artistic Concepts at the Crossing from Analog to Digital Photography,» examines how artists specifically employ electronic image processing, in what way it finds expression in the aesthetics of the image, and not lastly, which subjects and discourses the digital images primarily deal with. While Jeff Wall makes evident that photography has replaced painting in depicting modern life, its digital processing necessarily leads to the question of from what degree of intervention the photographic completely disintegrates into electronic ‹painting.›

In the course of its history, photography has led to the accumulation of an incalculable, heterogeneous