Photography:

Photographers are liars, deceiving themselves and their audiences. Con-cerned not with the art of photo-graphy, but with chatter of gadgetry and mechanics, they catalogue them-selves along with their equipment. (Straus and Nesterenko, 1974, 3). ~ince the beginning of recorded history, people have always attempted to represent their thoughts, their activities, their environ-ment(s), the putative world, through written or visual imagery of various sorts. Drawings on cave walls, sculptures, paintings, archi-tecture, poetry, legends, rituals, etc., and relatively recently, photographs. Since the invention of photographic technologies and the camera, representations of life and of living are no longer left exclusively to those specific members of a society called &dquo;ar-tists;&dquo; the more those technologies are sim-plified, the more available that medium of life-representation becomes. Now, with a minimum of effort and strategic competen-cies and a modicum of tactical competen-cies, nearly everyone can be a photographer; not only a maker of photographic images, a maker of photographic representations of life and of living, but a maker of identity through mechanical means. The practice of photography has been reduced to learning how to operate the machinery involved, and once one learns to operate the machinery, one becomes a photographer. Additionally, while ostensibly increasing a person’s artistic Harley Straus, instructor In the School of Journalism at the University of Iowa, is interested in applying phenomenology and transactionalism to photography Recent publications include co-authorship with Cyn