The early nineties was the tail end of cultural postmodernism, prior to contemporary art’s globalisation. Now  we have a flood of photographic images that many see in terms of photographs as dissolute fragments and photography as a totalized mass. Most of the photographic images we see around us in our visual culture  today are  consumed rapidly.   Photographs are exhausted and discarded quickly,  and their meanings are meant to be obvious and formulaic. They are not meant to be  looked at closely and for long.  There is no space for slow informed  looking.  

The turn to  an emphasis on intuition and spontaneity --- especially noticeable in street photography--is a  turn away from institutionlised photo-theory to embrace a naive  state, which expresses an aversion to thinking about photography,  to language and to  text.  Digital technology expanded the possibilities of photography well beyond the confines of art theory. Video is beginning to become an integral part, a logical extension of the work of  photographers who will thus redefine the field of photography.  The photographic now encompasses moving as well as still images. 

Despite the visual  turn in our culture there is no  replacement of language by photography only new new modes of interrelation from the Life magazine photo-story. There is now a  thorough intertwining of image and language, which is the nature of most of our photographic culture. 

For  much of the medium’s artistic history the ‘work’ was not thought to be the print but the publication, usually the book – an edited orchestration of images and text.  The renaissance of photographic book making in the last decade or so has again produced works that are affordable and with relatively little to do with the selling of editioned prints.

Photographs usually  come in sets, suites, series, sequences, pairings, iterations, photo-essays, albums, typologies, archives. These are usually in the form of  editing the selection and arrangement of images  often mediated by text. Editing is the  term we use to describe the fashioning and arrangement of words and pictures. 

If making the photo is often done quickly ---often in a flash---then after knowing what to take you have to do the editing. Photography is editing, editing after the taking. So we should be willing to experiment, particularly with sequencing in  our  publications and with image/text relations. 

The book form  can be considered a temporal medium since it creates a linear, clearly structured viewing experience to be perused in one or more sittings.