1. The proof that documentary photography is not a fad or a vogue lies in the history of other movements in photography.
2. It is life that is exciting and important, and life whole and unretouched.
3. A Farm Security Administration photograph of an old woman's knotted and gnarled hands is a human and social document of great moment and moving quality.
4. By the imagination and intelligence he possesses and uses, the photographer controls the new esthetic, finds the significant truth and gives it significant form.
5. The opportunities for publishing honest photographs of present-day life in magazines or newspapers are not many.
6. At the turn of the century art got mixed with photography.
7. We may say at once that photography is not art in the old sense. It is not a romantic, impressionistic medium, dependent on subjective factors and ignoring the objective. It is bound to realism in as complex a way as buildings are bound to the earth by the pull of gravitation.
8. A work of art, on this basis, must have meaning, it must have content, it must communicate, it must speak to an audience.
9. For communication, the photograph has qualities equaled by no other pictorial medium. If one wishes to present the interior of a slum dwelling where eight people live in one room, the camera will reveal the riddled floors, the dirty bedding, the dishes stacked unwashed on a table, the thousand and one details that total up to squalor and human degradation. To paint each item completely would take a dozen Hoochs and Chardins many months. Here with the instantaneous blink of the camera eye, we have reality captured, set down for as long as negative and print will endure.
10. photography. For the greatest objective of such work is to widen the world we live in, to acquaint us with the range and variety of human existence, to inform us (as it were forcibly) of unnecessary social horrors such as war, to make us aware of the civilization in which we live and hope to function as creative workers.
McCausland highlights some of the same issues that documentary photographers struggles with to this day. How much of the photographers personality are to be included in their work, but at the same time how much does that influence the work that they produce. If they add too much they remove information from the situation, if they don't add any they they are not telling a story. I think that this article with a couple of changes could have been written in the modern age and people would not questions what McCausland says, its still as true today as it was then. She touches on a couple of ethical and moral points that asks the photographer how honest a photo is, or does the camera always lie thanks to the photographer and their decisions?
