Nothing is more acceptable today than the photographic recycling of reality, acceptable as an everyday activity and as a branch of high art. Yet something about photography still keeps the first-rate professionals defensive and hortatory: virtually every important photographer right up to the present has written manifestoes and credos expounding photography’s moral and aesthetic mission. And photographers give the most contradictory accounts of what kind of knowledge they possess and what kind of art they practice.
— Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977