Photography internalizes some of the most interesting ontological issues regarding art. The question "Is it art?" haunted photographers throughout its history. Its inability to find alternatives to depiction complicated its entry into the modernist discourse when the other arts were engaged with abstraction. Photography's impulse to depict in its most utilitarian tendencies (for example photo-journalism as art) creates, to use the artist Jeff Wall's words, the "most problematic kind of photograph" which anchored itself through social validity. This to me is an insufficient condition for art. In response to these concerns I had over photography as an art form, I made a series of works that investigated the terms and conditions within which photography defined itself, the first of which is titled "Ode to the Pictorialists". Pictorialist photography in late 19c and early 20c referenced paintings in its composition, subject matter and its painterly surface which called for the creative manipulation of the image. When the normative practice of art-photography was established through modernism, this tradition was marginalized only to resurface with a vengeance in the digital era.