  At moderate and large momentum transfer, high energy vector meson
photoproduction and Compton scattering can be consistently explained by
mechanisms based on interactions and exchanges of constituent quarks and
gluons. This opens an original window on the partonic structure of hadronic
matter by emphasizing the role of quark correlations, quark exchange as
implemented through saturating Regge trajectories and non-perturbative effects
in the gluon propagator, which provides us with a bridge with lattice
calculations. Compton scattering is directly related to vector meson
photoproduction and enlarges the data set.
