[Struan Gray]

It's hard to innovate in a medium as staid as photography, and when you do you will often be accused of 'not taking photographs'. This whole site is a proof by demonstration.

I suspect that a lot of the innovators you seek are working in mixed media, particularly mixed electronic media. Photography - even digital photography - increasingly resembles writing sonnets or playing period brass: the limitations are part of the attraction, and skill and taste are demonstrated as much by showing an awareness and mastery of those limits as by whatever you do within them.

And as you say, the age group you are intereseted in are young. That doesn't just make them callow, it also makes them numerous. My impression of the photo universe is that it is incredibly diverse: there really are people doing all kinds of work in all kinds of ways. Identifying people whose work is distinctively enjoyable is an exercise in needle-hunting. You are also dependent on your own taste and judgement in a way that is less necessary when viewing reputations through the filter of history.