Photography at the Crossroads

I really enjoyed what Bernice Abbott had to say about photography in general in this piece. She mentioned that sometimes photographers get lost in the technique and forget about the content and I strongly agree with that. This essay is from 1951 so of course we have had many technological advances since then but even at that time photographers were spending a lot of time in the dark room trying to perfect their technique. While this is important, it should not be the focus when taking a photograph. As Abbott points out, there have been many "How to do it" books on photography. While these are helpful with how to use cameras, compose a picture etc., you can know how to do all of that and still not know how to take a meaningful picture. Photography is more than just pointing and shooting. "The photographer creates, evolves a better, more selective, more cause seeing eye by looking ever more sharply at what is going on with the world." A photographer can see a moment worth photographing in places where others may not. And I also like what she had to say about documentary photography. It is often in a separate category almost from photography itself which I don't really understand. Photography was originally used to document and make likenesses of people as a keep sake or to send to loved ones. People used photography to show what was happening in their lives and the world. Documentary photography does just that. It is so engrained in our culture that sometimes I think we forget it because we are so used to seeing it. Without documentary photography where would our newspapers, magazines and websites be?