Many who are making cellphone images are advocates with a stake in the outcome of what they are depicting. In some ways this makes their work more honest and easier to read - they can also manipulate, although the work of professionals can be quite manipulative as well.

There are very few instances where writers have also been effective image makers - different skill sets are required.

Photographs need to demand the viewer's attention, often implicitly, posing questions as to the nature of what is being depicted. Photographs are not there to show us the world, but to show us a version of what may be happening.

Word, image, and sound all must have primacy in the development of the narrative.

We have a long history of snapshot photography that appeared to many to be more arbitrary and idiosyncratic than much of the work of professionals. We valued it for what it could tell us about the details of people's daily lives.

I always believed that photography was subjective, interpretive and certainly did not represent the truth, but I did think that its status as a societal and historical referent needed to be both safeguarded and illuminated....now photojournalism is devolving into yet another medium perceived as intending to shock, titillate, sell, distort.

In fact, the new malleability of the image may eventually lead to a profound undermining of photography's status as an inherently truthful pictorial form... If even a minimal confidence in photography does not survive, it is questionable whether many pictures will have meaning anymore, not only as symbols but as evidence.