In this age of smartphones and Facebook and photo-editing software, anyone can be a photographer. Or can they? That's the question José Betancourt, a photography professor in the Art & Art History Department at The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH), poses to students each spring semester in his Documentary Photography class. "I feel strongly about what's happening with the world of journalism and how it seems like everyone is going to this idea of the person out on the street uploading the photos," said Betancourt. "The way things are now, people are always putting up photos and you don't know what's real. But if you have a reliable source, you can take what you see as true." To get students to understand that concept, he gives them a crash course on the history of documentary photography before he sends them out to shoot. "From the early 1900s there's been this artistic influence in documentary photography," he said, referring to the influential work of artists like Walker Evans, Lewis Hine, and Jacob Riis. "So I give them things to think about and read like 'Doing Documentary Work' by Robert Coles, which talks about social documentary."