Whilst a photography student in the 1980s I realized that numerous American photographers of the early 20th century had been pushed into the background. In the postwar period the socio-critical work of Lewis Hine or Dorothea Lange, some of which was state-commissioned during the New Deal, was sidelined with lasting effect as part of an equally state-sponsored campaign of anti-communism.

What was handed down to us was a process of canonization that gave preference to, for example, Paul Strand’s images of the Modernist sublime from the same period. This process seemed guided not by criteria of quality but by the dictates of cultural policy, and the Museum of Modern Art played no small part in it.

In traditional documentary photography the photograph has been seen is as a re-presentation of nature, an unmediated transcription of reality onto film. This notion of photography as veracity endows the photograph with the capacity to prove, to either present factual evidence or stand as a fact itself.to an unquestioned acceptance that the photograph presents us with a faithful reproduction of what "has been there."

The very act of photography as interpretive (the photographer chooses what to photograph, the camera is controlled), and necessarily selective (the photograph is limited by the camera's field of vision--the frame), is denied in favor of the photograph's construction as presence, truth, fact, and proof.

Most philosophies or reflections on photography argue that the photograph is a means of communication, rather than a piece of factual evidence. That the photograph communicates arises only from the meaning we ascribe to it; meaning does not inhere in the photograph itself. The photograph, then, can only verify the meaning we simultaneously invest in, and extract from, it. Rather than presenting an evidential and singular Truth, the photograph invites the speculation of multiple meanings.