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This thesis attempts to answer questions and concerns of Martha Rosler and Allan Sekula regarding documentary photography. Rosler wondered – decades ago, now – if documentary photography could ever supersede its benign liberal origins and become, in her own words, radical. Sekula feared our inattentiveness to the tool’s equal use by the state to repressive ends. By addressing the past preoccupations of the arch-documentarians, this thesis attempts to find the state of documentary and image-making in the contemporary.This paper consists of three parts: the first, which deals with the battle surrounding image-making in public as embodied by copwatching; the second, which more directly addresses the impact of cell phones on documentary, the decline of professional news photography, and the rise of a new subject-author; and the last, which considers the operation of the drone and the images it produces.