Like an orator without a tongue, a photographer without a camera is something of a misnomer. The deduction of the camera conveyed here renders the definition superfluous and the aspiring communicator mute and constant. A photographer’s recognition of being so, is therefore the result of a union between the corporeal and the mechanical, the evolving and the developing.

The camera in the hands of a photographer extends their communicative abilities beyond normal human limitations, it acts when called upon, as an expressive auxiliary organ. We can perhaps call photographers Cyborgs, but only by stretching the definition past the cardiac patient with a pacemaker implant, towards a more metaphoric understanding of our close relationship with technology. American photographer Dorothea Lange understood this clearly nearly 80 years ago when she explained that ‘for better or worse, the destiny of the photographer is bound up with the destinies of a machine’ (Sayer, 2009:56).