a photographer's notebook

We may live in a time, our time, right now, where a popular explosion of photography, fuelled by zero film costs, wifi and mobile devices has created an environment where swathes of us with access to imaging tools choose to be walking billboards for corporations, documenting and advertising their own life within capitalism, which in and of itself is quite an interesting mass documentary series, it’s certainly holding a mirror up to how infused and entwined the human race has become with product, unwitting sales and marketing tools for the corporations that with unseen wires continually make us dance to their tune. Combating this we have a front line, the trenches where photographers, documenters, writers, educators, artists are truly rallying together, forging communities, collectives and setting out to not merely document social issues and the repercussions of policy, of communities and the individual, intimate stories of peoples sharing testimony and first hand accounts of life in the now but to document with a mission to facilitate change. These acts of sharing, these peaceful bullets of truth inform, engage, educate, change perceptions, change the assumptions and stereotypes, erode the damage that’s so continuously perpetrated by editorial sensationalization, when all that’s really hankered for is ratings and advertising revenue.