By now I had morphed into a photographer who was straddling the film and digital worlds with little idea of the digital world was closing in on me, or was reshaping photography. I was primarily looking at images on the monitor but still thinking of photography in the old film terms --eg., the snapshot of the Nth Melbourne railway station whilst I was on the road.
I had not yet realised that curators would frame the pushing the boundaries of art photography as primarily coming from the use of computer software to create complex imagery that stood in stark contrast to the mundane and normal digital photography being produced.
I was vaguely thinking in terms of self-publishing the best photographs from my portfolio. Only I didn't really have a portfolio. Nor was I sure how to go about creating one---other than taking lots of photographs, selecting the best, and approaching Blurb.
John Szarkowski challenged the ability of photography to explain large-scale public subjects in both the preface to The Photographer's Eye (1966) and in Mirrors and Windows (1978). In The Photographer's Eye he wrote, "Photography has never been successful at narrative" and he declared the fields of photojournalism and documentary non-effectual in Mirrors and Windows writing, "Photography's failure to explain large public issues has become increasingly clear...Most issues of importance cannot be photographed." He argued that attempts to photograph World War II were unable to explain events without heavy captioning.