the screen they can be placed into any number of intermedial relations, i.e. linked with text, icons, sound, video streams, etc. As demonstrated in the text by Susanne Holschbach, the precursors to these multi-media options can be found in the coupling of photography and print media. In view of the «Continuities and differences between photographic and post-photographic mediality,» which the text of the same name illustrates from a historical perspective, the most recent technological transformation in photography thus proves to be less a radical break with its conventional application than a multiplication of its uses in (mass) media, i.e. those uses based on the dispositive of mechanical reproduction. The epistemological cut between analog and digital photography is the result of its chemical carrier having become obsolete. Digitalization makes the circuitous route via film development and print superfluous; however, in the same move the photograph loses its materiality—it can be instantly deleted or altered without leaving behind a trace of its original state. However, the use and the reception of photographs as documents—or rather verification of the existence of

something—were based on precisely that specific aspect of the chemo-optical process of irreversibly fixing the photographed object or scene as a trace of light on the photosensitive layer. The loss of this indexical materiality blankets the promise of the photograph's reality with lasting doubt. Nevertheless, journalism and shutter photography in particular still continue to make an appeal to take photographs as a strategy of authentication—new forms of communication such as taking and sending photographs per cell phone even speak for an intensification of photographic immediacy through its digitalization. In her text «Instant Images,» Kathrin Peters pursues considerations of in how far the overemphasis of the coincidental puts the status of the amateur on the one hand, and that of the professional press photographer on the other hand, up for debate: Both of them have acquired certain skills, technical know-how and aesthetic standards that are unnecessary in the immediacy of digital shooting, distributing and consuming, and which are even a hindrance to expressing authenticity and ‹realness.› Peters suspects that along with the digital production and circulation