Making art and making documentary photographs are two different things, even though much of how we go about both overlap. I love photography and using what I know about composition and design in order to better communicate. Part of this picture appeared in the paper today. I say part because the photograph was cropped in the designing of the page into a square. The angle of this photograph is what makes this photograph interesting - it uses a wide angle from down low that distorts the church. Its one of those odd areas of documentary work that gets argued quite a bit - does the lens change the meaning of the truth? I recently read that using the tools that we have to make our work is akin to filtering information through our own beliefs, we can't completely exclude the affects of these outside factors in the reading of the photograph, but they become part of the artist or photographers vocabulary. As a photographer I wanted to use the leading lines of the window to the right and the crane to the left to lead the eye upward from the base or bottom of the picture. These lines were cropped out in the paper and this diminished the eye movement from the base upward. This may seem minor in scope, but its really not. Communicating this solid base allows us to better understand what we're looking at, even if on a subconscious level. We now can buy into the distortion having a firm ground or base. It seems funny writing about this because no one looking at the picture in the paper came even close to thinking about these matters, they simply liked, disliked or were indifferent to the picture. The same set of reactions are likely even if the image would have been presented un-cropped. As artists and photographers though we must think about these things because it is the way we communicate what we do the best we can. So when its not presented as we would present it, it diminishes our ability to communicate our story. Meadville Tribune photograph by Richard Sayer