Everyone concedes that photography is now a medium of exchange as much as a mode of documentation.... photographing has become the visual equivalent of cellphone chatter.

All of us tend to look at photographs as if we are simply gazing through a two-dimensional window onto some outside world. This is almost a perceptual necessity in order to see what the photograph is of, we must first repress our consciousness of what the photograph is.

Over the past two decades, the boundary between photography and other media like painting, sculpture, or performance has become increasingly porous. It would seem that each medium has absorbed the other, leaving the photographic residing everywhere, but nowhere in particular.

[A digital snapshot] is meant primarily as a means of communication, and the images being sent are almost as ephemeral as speech, so rarely are they printed and made physical.