I spent 5 days in a ward 4GS at  the Flinders Medical Centre (FMC) last week, due to the skin graft on my  leg becoming infected,  whilst  I was preparing for the Mallee Routes exhibition at the Murray Bridge Regional Gallery.  I ended up at the emergency department of the Victor Harbor Hospital on the  Sunday of the exhibition open, then went to FMC early on the Monday morning. I left FMC late on Friday afternoon. 

Though I was on an intravenous antibiotic drip  for the infection every six hours for the 5 days I was ward 4GS  I was allowed to make short walks  outside the ward in-between the 6 hours.  

The  short walks meant that I  mostly  explored the area  around the coffee shop such as  Theo's or the cafe in the Centre for Innovation in Cancer.   I would usually wander around this area  after  treating  myself  to a cup of coffee;  or after dinner at 5pm. 

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It is  now generally acknowledged that the photographic image has become firmly established as the predominant form of online imagery, and  that photography is now an increasingly pervasive mode of cultural production. 

However, the field of photography has expanded to such an extent,  with the various social media platforms,  digitalisation and the elaborate infrastructure, diversity of technologies  and computational processes,  that photography's specificity as  a specialized discipline or medium no longer makes much sense.  Photography is a form of art,  not a medium in the sense adopted and developed by modernist formalism in the late 20th century.  

We can go further and say that the  photographic is  no longer best understood as a particular art; it is currently the dominant form of the image in general in western culture. 

So we should think in terms of photography in art rather than art photography, since photography plays an important role in contemporary art beyond what we may call photographic art. One aspect of that role was the way that photography was used to change the status and thereby the character of the traditional ‘arts’ of painting and sculpture.