Statement of Purpose

I have other blogs. You can see them in the right column. The reason I'm starting a new blog is to open a discussion on the emergence of a new, hybrid form of documentary photography that merges traditional approaches with techniques from documentary filmmaking, strategies from new media and concepts from fine art practice.

I still love traditional documentary photography, but that's not where we are anymore. New technologies like hybrid DSLRs (technically, DSLs, I suppose, since the best of these are now mirrorless), tiny audio recorders, inexpensive large-capacity memory cards, laptop-based video editing, and high-speed Internet access now make the old model only a jumping-off point.

These new capabilities -- arising at a time when traditional publishing is in crisis and a billion amateurs with cell phone cameras have spot news covered -- force us to ask: where should we take the idea of documentary photography? There's no moving backward. So where are we going?