Though photographers have not ceased to look for beauty, photography is no
longer thought to create, under the aegis of beauty, a psychic breakthrough.
Ambitious modernists, like Weston and Cartier-Bresson, who understand
photography as a genuinely new way of seeing (precise, intelligent, even
scientific), have been challenged by photographers of a later generation, like
Robert Frank, who want a camera eye that is not piercing but democratic, who
don’t claim to be setting new standards for seeing.
