reality is, in Viktor Shklovsky’s word, de-familiarized. What is being urged is an aggressive relation to all subjects. Armed with their machines, photographers are to make an assault on reality—which is perceived as recalcitrant, as only deceptively available, as unreal. “The pictures have a reality for me that the people don’t,” Avedon has declared. “It is through the photographs that I know them.”
— Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977