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incalculable number of texts as a technique which records an image on photosensitive material, the division between photography, digital photography, and post-photography is often handled with far less precision. Since the variants are diverse: images are recorded digitally, photographs are intruded upon at a later stage and without a trace; digital recordings are assembled into a new image – and finally we have those images generated solely on the computer and possessing only the suggestion of photography. In this nuance-laden field of dispositive technical elements, three types of images can be sketched out: ‹analog photography,› ‹digital photography,› and ‹post-photography›. Often enough the terms ‹digital› and ‹post-› photography› are used synonymously, even though each describes a different process. [4] Like with analog photography, the digital variant also relies on the idea of light passing through a lens. But, unlike in analog procedures, the digital apparatus no longer inscribes the light on photosensitive material; instead, it stores it as a series of electronic impulses on a chip: so developing film in a darkroom becomes superfluous. This type of production really does allow itself to be
called ‹digital photography› since, although the chemical light-inscribing process is replaced by an electronic one, the digital procedure nevertheless remains based on the inscribing of light. From the start, photography produced in this manner finds itself in a state requiring no direct material carriers (ignoring the computer’s hardware for a moment) and is easily manipulated electronically.
The description ‹post-photography› harbors in itself two decisive aspects for evaluating the medium: the reference to photography on the one hand, and its technical replacement by ways of digitally designing visual information on the other. [5] Its actual service begins either after the digitalization of whatever well-disposed image material it uses, or manages perfectly well without such reference material. While conventional photography techniques could never do without the object in front of the camera, the photographic depiction in the digital image-production process serves at best as what supplies the start-material. In this sense it would be better to call post-photographic work an image rhetoric, which, in the most extreme case, can design such images using