[A digital snapshot] is meant primarily as a means of communication, and the images being sent are almost as ephemeral as speech, so rarely are they printed and made physical.

Everyone concedes that photography is now a medium of exchange as much as a mode of documentation.... photographing has become the visual equivalent of cellphone chatter.

[A digital snapshot] is meant primarily as a means of communication, and the images being sent are almost as ephemeral as speech, so rarely are they printed and made physical.

All of us tend to look at photographs as if we are simply gazing through a two-dimensional window onto some outside world. This is almost a perceptual necessity; in order to see what the photograph is of, we must first repress our consciousness of what the photograph is.

Human experience comes suspended in the sickly-sweet amniotic fluid of commercial photography. And a world normally animated by abrasive differences is blithely reduced to a single, homogeneous National Geographic way of seeing.

Over the past two decades, the boundary between photography and other media like painting, sculpture, or performance has become increasingly porous. It would seem that each medium has absorbed the other, leaving the photographic residing everywhere, but nowhere in particular.

Most importantly, postmodernism comes down on the side of photography and power, not photography as power. As a consequence, photography continues to be conceived as an inconsequential vehicle or passage for real powers that always originate elsewhere.