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8 INTRODUCTION
divergent tendencies from which they drew strength continue to assert themselves.
Current views and trends
Of the two camps into which modern photography is split, one follows the realistic tradition. True, Taine's intention to reproduce the objects as they are definitely belongs to the past; the present-day realists have learned, or relearned, that reality is as we see it. But much as they are aware of this, they resemble the nineteenth-century realists in that they enhance the camera's recording and revealing abilities and, accordingly, consider it their task as photographers to make the ''best statement of facts/'37 The late Edward Weston, for instance, highly valued the unique precision with which instantaneous photography mechanically registers fine detail and the "unbroken sequence of infinitely subtle gradations from black to white"38 —a testimony which carries all the more weight since he often indulges in wresting abstract compositions from nature. It is evident that Weston refers to camera revelations rather than representations of familiar sights. What thrills us today then is the power of the medium, so greatly increased by technical innovations and scientific discoveries, to open up new, hitherto unsuspected dimensions of reality. Even though the late Laszlo MoholyNagy was anything but a realist, he extolled records capturing objects from unusual angles or combinations of phenomena never before seen together; the fabulous disclosures of high-speed, micro and macro-photography; the penetrations obtained by means of infrared emulsions, etc. Photography, he declares, is the "golden key opening the doors to the wonders of the external universe."39 Is this a poetic exaggeration? In his book, Schoepfung aus dem Wassertropfen (Creation out of a Waterdrop) , the German photographer Gustav Schenk uncovers the Lilliputian world contained in a square millimeter of moving plain water— an endless succession of shapes so fantastic that they seem to have been dreamed rather than found.
In thus showing the "wonders of the external universe," realistic photography has taken on two important functions unforseeable in its earlier stages of development. (This may explain why, for instance, Moholy-Nagy's account of contemporary camera work breathes a warmth and a sense of participation absent in pertinent nineteenth-century statements.)
First, modern photography has not only considerably enlarged our vision but, in doing so, adjusted it to man's situation in a technological age. A conspicuous feature of this situation is that the viewpoints and perspectives that framed our images of nature for long stretches of the past