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representations of a real (or a staged) occurrence. The irritation begins at second glance or in the course of the series of images; it lifts the ‹naive› perception of the scene and thus opens up a further horizon of meaning. [45]

Digital Trouble

The welcoming of the creative potential and the multi-media ‹connectability› of a digitalized photograph is eclipsed by a critical discourse, which above all points out the potential for manipulation and forgery of all kinds in electronic image processing. For this reason, it is not coincidental that the debate over the loss of the credibility of photographic images ignites in the area of photojournalism. The authority of the classical photo report is particularly bound to photographic indexicality, in which the ‹That's how it was› of the object being shown is substantiated by the photographer's ‹I was there,› and vice versa. Digitalization severs the indexical connection between the photograph and the object of the photograph, and at the same time it expropriates the photographer in that the photo is now accessible to any form of

 

processing. Photographer associations fear that the simplification of the ‹creative› editing of photographic masters will gradually disable the difference between ‹authentic› and ‹manipulated› photos and thus in the end completely undermine the belief in the documentary value of photography. [46] The theoretical contributions that look into this aspect of digitalization necessarily return to the long history of forging images for the specific purpose of deception and to the ‹classical› processes of image/text layout that confer meaning. [47] Above and beyond that, authors such as Martha Rosler, who as an artist examined the conditions of a critical practice of documentary photography, emphasize the fundamental dependence of photography and its documentary function on social, political and discursive contexts. [48] These aspects allow relativizing the meaning of the technological transformation from analog to digital photography and shifting to the more fundamental question of the changes in the use of media by society.

However, the apprehension that the loss of photographic indexicality triggers off goes beyond the

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