Before joining academia, from 1982 to 1993, Rutherford was a commercial photographer in Toronto, Canada, and made photographs for advertising, public relations and government agencies, as well as several nonprofit organisations.

 

In his photographs, he often noticed surprising differences between the scenes and objects he set out to record—and the images in the resulting photographs. These (sometimes subtle, but rarely anticipatable) discrepancies offered the tantalising possibility that there was something going on which the popular conception of photography (what it is and what it does) may hinder our ability to recognise. He explored these ideas in his essay Is This Photograph Taken?

 

Intrigued by the implications of these discrepancies, Rutherford’s current photographic project (Give Agency to the Medium, Step Back and See What Happens) ignores the established conventions of visual representation for "good" photographs and explores an alternative approach to photographic practice: one which invites the active (or, the act of) collaboration by the medium.

 

This project challenges the idea that photographs are accurate records of events in the world "out there" and, instead, encourages the viewer to step outside this popular conception of photography and see the subject—and the medium of photography—from a new perspective.

 

By arranging situations in which he is unable to determine the contents and the composition of photographs and how the medium will render "the things in front of the lens," the scenes and tableaux recorded in these photographs were not "taken," but were instead created by the act of photographing them.

 

These are all straight photographs. In some, he has enhanced the contrast, brightness, or colour saturation, but has not otherwise manipulated the results.