For a long time I used to go to bed with a camera. But the writing is on the wall: the days of the framed print on the mantelpiece, of the yellowing snapshot with the handwritten inscription, of the shoebox in the attic, of the heroic explorer of slums with his Nikon and of the flaneur with his Leica are over. To-day, what the photograph is a replica of seems much less important than what it is linked to. Other questions are being put forward that overshadow the connection between that which was in-front of the camera lens and the picture that one is holding in the hand. How many times was it liked, shared and re-twited? What is the political power peculiar to an algorithm, a power that is not limited to images but also inhabits politics, art and language. What all these new questions have in common is that they address repetition, self-replication, dissemination over questions that pertain to the content of the image, to what the content represents and what this says about the real world.
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