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Petra Karadimas uses a conventional camera and film to make her photographs. These analog images are her archive, from which she selects individual images for either digital manipulation or to keep them (more or less) unchanged. For Karadimas, images are spaces where confrontations between opposites occur. These confrontations can take place on various different levels.

Digital manipulation is at the heart of Karadimas' work. Viewed from a distance, the images look like regular photographs, especially since they were exposed on photographic paper. Only at second glance it becomes apparent, that the images have been extensively retouched. The photographic grain has been replaced by a 'digital brushstroke', that exists virtually, but not as a texture that can be felt or grasped.

In advertising retouching is used mainly for optimization and idealization purposes. In Karadimas' work it is used in a heightend form. Through exaggeration retouching becomes an artistic style, a handwriting, that paradoxically is none. The principle authenticity of the photographic proof of reality is being questioned along with the subjective expression expected from painting.

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“The fact that the classical adversaries photography and painting is what is being played with, lets both their relationships to so-called reality take center stage. Which of the two arts is closer to reality or more genuine, which one represents a more authentic image of what is? Is it photography with its supposedly so mercilessly objective optic or is it the subjective glance, frozen in the gesture of the one producing it? This dualism between subjective and objective is what breaks open the totalitarian claim of a reality generally accepted as true. An answer to the question of what reality is, Karadimas naturally doesn't offer. That, apparently, was not her goal. Instead her works point to the fragility of our conception of reality."