Can photographs still be a catalyst for positive social change in a world saturated with images? Has the move from analogue to digital capture and display made any difference to photography? Can photographers engage with politics in their work? These and many other questions were debated at the London Art Fair, which held a specialist Photography Focus Day on 19 January.

All four day-time talks were fully booked before the event opened, and speakers such as Monica Allende (picture editor of The Sunday Times), Jess Crombie (film and photography manager at Save the Children), Charlotte Cotton (creative director, London Galleries, National Media Museum), Jason Evans (photographer and lecturer) and Anna Fox (photographer and lecturer) made some thoughtful contributions to the debates. Jess Crombie urged NGOs to take a braver approach to user-generated content, for example, pointing to a recent exhibition by Vice picture editor Alex Sturrock, No Comfort, as a good example of how this approach can work.

Sturrock asked people in Zimbabwe, Gaza, Toronto, Kabul and Haiti to take photographs on their mobile phones, then text the images back to the UK. The shots were shown in real time at the New Gallery, Peckham, London over three days, on a series of simple monitors. “I’d like to see more non-participatory photography, produced without guidelines,” said Crombie. “NGOs need to be brave and relax control.”

Charlotte Cotton and Jason Evans discussed the ‘dematerialisation’ of photography, meanwhile, considering the rise of digital images, the decline of photographic prints and the effect, if any, it’s had on photography. Cotton said she’d gone through a “place of fear” ten years ago but had now embraced the shift. “I hear from photographers that they have platform sensitivity, but really it’s a bit like the end of a long-term relationship,” she said. “Some people will feel ‘Well that was a waste of time” and move on and others will be more upset but in the end we’ll all get over it.

“People talk in terms of an Armageddon about the “death of the print” and the heritage that might be lost, but I don’t think we’re in that position at all,” she continued. “We have both platforms; films and prints still exist if you feel that’s the only way to make your voice heard. As Jason has said, it’s not a case of either/or, it’s either/and. But I’m glad that 15 year olds won’t have to carry all the baggage that those of us who came through the photographic ghetto had.”

“We’re all old farts,” said Evans, adding that the debate about photographic prints was irrelevant to the next generation, growing up with digital imaging. He looks at more images than ever before because they’ve become so accessible online, he said, and is inspired by the creative blogs curating and publishing interesting work. But he also sounded a warning note. “What better way to show a crappy photograph than on a MacBookPro? Everything looks fantastic,” he said. “Then you print it off and think ‘What is this?’."

The next generation also figured large in the Politics in Photography debate, with Photoworks’ Ben Burbridge analysing the images of the recent student protests. Many of the images used in the newspapers focused on the violence surrounding the events, he noted; images the students uploaded to Flickr had a much less abrasive feel. Anna Fox talked through her experiences in the 1980s, meanwhile, pointing out that while she hadn’t set out to make political statements with her early projects, Basingstoke and Workstations, as a young photographer interested in society that was inevitably what she did.

“The thing that goes through my mind now when I look at these images is the phrase ‘There’s no such thing as society’ [a quote from Margaret Thatcher in 1987]. It’s the direct opposite of the Big Society today [launched by David Cameron in July 2010], so perhaps there are young photographers now interested in that.”