ABSTRACT
The third phase of documentary emerged as the practices of observation began to be questioned. Observation or verité practices were underpinned by the claim that the camera could be more truthful if human intervention was reduced to a minimum. However, by the middle of the 1990s, widespread doubts were expressed about the truthfulness of the photographic image itself. The then-new digital technologies of image creation seemed to be changing the very nature of photography by increasing the potential for undetectable alterations and other human interventions. These concerns about digital imaging technologies emerged first in relation to still photography as digital technologies became pervasive in press photography and started to be available to non-professionals as well. The first digital still cameras (defined as cameras using a CCD image sensor and saving images digitally) emerged around 1991. They immediately caused anxieties around the evidential nature of the photographic image. During the development of photography over the nineteenth century, a whole mystique had grown up around the seemingly magical chemical processes of a film negative reacting to light. Photography seemed to evade, more or less, the capacity of human intervention in the moment of formation of the image. The original negative remained the original. And any subsequent manipulation of that image would leave a trace, or could be refuted by reference to the original negative. In the place of this quasi-magical chemical process, digital cameras seemed to offer an electronic process in which original and copy were identical, and subsequent alteration of the image could not be detected.
