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.
