It took a long time to deconstruct the positivist conception of objectivity and truth that had underpinned the street or documentary photography of the 20th century and to accept that photography is an interpretation of the present produced from a particular perspective of diverse, fluid subjects.
Consequently, there are many kinds of photographies and our understanding of the past today are the pictures, images, and memories scattered throughout the city like a collection of snapshots strewn upon its floor, some prominently displayed, some a little obscured, others well buried. All can be picked up and re-circulated to differing ends. Indeed, somewhat akin to the “cut and paste” of contemporary digital culture that enables various elements to be easily combined, manipulated, and, of course, disposed.
The circulating images in our visual culture are an important part of the way we think and maintain our vast reservoir of sharable and contested meanings and memories as well as structuring our encounters with other human beings. In this image-world images continually shift the meaning of things and we make new images out of the old. Images are in flux or ever becoming. Images situate us, just as we make images from them.