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. 

However, a book connects pictures together and that implies a narrative--a story of some sort but I had no story to tell. I approached my photography  from the point of view of  just capturing a picture not  telling a story i.e.,   how a  series of events or objects become connected and are then interpreted by the reader.  

The book itself is a textual product and we have a photo text that is a site of intertextuality. This intertextuality  highlights  the diversity of photographic practices, and breaks with  approaching photographic representation as an art form with its auteurist paradigm  of the photographic author that is derived from conventional art history and standard Anglo-American photo-criticism.

 It is a break because it involves a recognition that context---social, cultural historical ---affects the reception of the photographic text.