The invention of the digital camera has meant that photography has become an accessible art form for so many people. By the first decade of the 21st century film-based photography had become a niche activity.

One critical reaction to the new world of digital photography comes from Richard White, an Australian large format photographer based in Victoria He says that this new style of photography seems to be everywhere and it seems to be done to death. We are over saturated with imagery to the point that people don’t notice the good pictures any more.

White adds:

I am over the over saturated, over manipulated, over worked, over done vacuous pictures that pass for photography these days. The composite images that fool us without clarification, the jacket that was photographed blue, but changed to red because some geek has squeezed it into some software package that has been designed to deceive us with its clever tricks. I am over all the false colours that appear in images most of the time, because mainly people have been heavy handed with the slider and maybe they are trying to cover up their inadequate image.

Ian Macdonald graduated from Elam, Auckland in 1975 majoring in photography. He has exhibited and been published consistently since and is known for his photography on New Zealand environmental issues. He ran Real Pictures Gallery during the 1980s and more recently the Matakana Pictures Gallery.

He works commercially as a photographer most recently as the stills photographer for the BBC Science Department.

Real Pictures Gallery was an Auckland based dealer gallery established and run by Ian MacDonald, which operated from 1979 until 1990. It was almost exclusively dedicated to the exhibiting of New Zealand photography. Matakana Pictures Gallery -was one of New Zealand's three specialist photography galleries. It ran as a dedicated photography gallery for a year before closing in 2006.

Cathedral Square, Milan is one of Gerhard Richter's largest figurative paintings. The work features the northern side of the cathedral square, onto which the shopping centre Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II faces. The façade of the 19th century Galleria covers a large area of the painting’s left side. This is a contrast to the right of the picture, where one can see two left side aisles of the gothic cathedral and the adjacent square.

This painting was a commissioned work for the company Siemens Elettra and it remained at the company's headquarters in Milan for 30 years. According to Richter, this commission was the beginning of an ongoing preoccupation with townscapes.

Judith Crispin or Hsien-Ku 's The Cartographer's Illusion explores how our own memories, our own experiences, overlay the act of seeing itself. The photograph becomes like a prism which transforms the light which passes through it – a language of symbols carved in light.

The photographs in this series represent the imperfection and strangeness of the life Crispin has been given, and its beauty and sadness too.

One of my favorites of Jean-Michel’s Baquiat's work. The background is more metallic, lighter, more spectral.

This painting has been grounded with a dull, gray paint, a departure from the colorful backgrounds the artist typically employed. In the work’s center, a faceless figure is shown riding a skeleton, the back of its head facing the viewer.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, USA, has an exhibition entitled Photography and the American Civil War. This war—its documentation, its soldiers, its battlefields—was the arena of the camera's debut in America.

This depicts the aftermath of the destruction of a Confederate military train filled with gunpowder. When abandoning Atlanta, Confederate General John Bell Hood ordered his troops to set the boxcars on fire so that the Union army would never be able to make use of the train. The explosion also completely leveled the nearby mill, leaving evidence of only a few rail wheels and axles.

Neil Pardington's photograph Mammal Attic #1, Canterbury Museum, shows a room (barely) containing a taxidermied elephant with an ominous tear in its shoulder, and in front of it a shark – its fin visible behind a set of steel shelves.

The wooden crates, shelves and scrunched together cloths in this image suggest the activities of preserving, cataloguing and caring for the curious miscellany of objects deemed worthy of exhibition in New Zealand's national institutions.