The experience of photography, since its inception, has been fundamentally structured by the sense that it is a realist medium: its basic character has always been understood to be given by its precise, mechanical and impersonal rendering of the appearance of objects. This character links photography inextricably to modern vision, and in particular modern vision as exemplified in science: vision is a vehicle of knowledge and truth in an empiricist culture. Photography looked at as an extension of the diorama can be understood as a sort of contradiction in terms which modernity is constantly producing: it is 'natural magic'. Modernity chases magic from the world. It is a project of disenchantment or demythification which rigorously reduces the world to its appearance, its visible surface; it reduces both the knowable and the existent world to the observable properties and behaviour of material things: the world is merely matter in motion.
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