Documentary photography--an endangered art - The Los Angeles Times

The 10 photographers in “Engaged Observers,” opening June 29 at the Getty Museum, are at once storytellers, witnesses, advocates for justice, investigative journalists, consciousness raisers, evidence gatherers and educators. They’re also something of an endangered species, threatened by the destruction of their professional habitat. Magazines that used to commission such photographers to create in-depth chronicles of social phenomena, cultural conflict and struggle and change within communities have either gone out of print (the most legendary, Life, died as a weekly in 1972 and as a monthly in 2000) or are operating on scarcer and scarcer resources.- The LA Times


Photos taken last weekend during the Santa Barbara Summer Street Solstice. By Keith Skelton