While most people taking photographs are only seconding received notions of the beautiful, ambitious professionals usually think they are challenging them. According to heroic modernists like Weston, the photographer’s venture is elitist, prophetic, subversive, revelatory. Photographers claimed to be performing the Blakean task of cleansing the senses, “revealing to others the living world around them,” as Weston described his own work, “showing to them what their own unseeing eyes had missed.”