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.”
