Photographer as bit player:

The role of the photographer is largely based upon a point-and-shoot model, in which after “witnessing” an event the images are selected, captioned, designed, contextualized by others who were not there. The essential ambiguity of the photograph, its multiple meanings, the intuitions reflected by the impact of the lens, the film, the quick shutter and the photographer, are minimized. Photographs are frequently picked because they look like other “good” photographs since that is the easiest way to select if one was not at the scene. The gradual disappearance of the photo essay leaves individual photographs increasingly at the mercy of other contextualizing media that generally serve to reduce their meaning. The photographer gets to say it all, or very little, with one image extracted from a group of imagery, almost a fragment. Imagine watching a film which is constantly interrupted by explicatory text. Or, as one distinguished photographer said while handing over a large pile of unedited photographs from a large reportage that he had just finished: Pick the images that you want, that’s what everyone else does. It doesn’t matter what I think.