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PHOTOGRAPHY 9
have become relative. In a crudely physical sense we are moving about with the greatest of ease and incomparable speed so that stable impressions yield to ever-changing ones: bird's-eye views of terrestrial landscapes have become quite common; not one single object has retained a fixed, definitely recognizable appearance.
The same applies to phenomena on the ideological plane. Given to analysis, we pass in review, and break down into comparable elements, all the complex value systems that have come to us in the form of beliefs, ideas, or cultures, thereby of course weakening their claim to absoluteness. So we find ourselves increasingly surrounded by mental configurations which we are free to interpret at will. Each is iridescent with meanings, while the great beliefs or ideas from which they issue grow paler. Similarly, photography has effectively impressed upon us the dissolution of traditional perspectives. Think of the many prints picturing unwonted aspects of reality— spatial depth and flatness are strangely intertwined, and objects apparently well-known turn into inscrutable patterns. All in all, the realists among the modern photographers have done much to synchronize our vision with topical experiences in other dimensions. That is, they have made us perceive the world we actually live in— no mean achievement considering the power of resistance inherent in habits of seeing. In fact, some such habits stubbornly survive. For instance, the predilection which many people show today for wide vistas and panoramic views may well go back to an era less dynamic than ours.
Second, precisely by exploding perceptual traditions, modern photography has assumed another function— that of influencing art. Marcel Duchamp relates that in 1912, when he was painting his Nude Descending the Staircase, Paris art circles were stimulated by stroboscopic and multipleexposure high-speed photographs.40 What a change in the relationships between photography and painting! Unlike nineteenth-century photography, which at best served as an aid to artists eager to be true to nature— nature still conceived in terms of time-honored visual conventions— scientific camera explorations of the first decades of the twentieth century were a source of inspiration to artists, who then began to defy these conventions.41 It sounds paradoxical that, of all media, realistic photography should thus have contributed to the rise of abstract art. But the same technological advance that made possible photographs bringing our vision, so to speak, up to date has left its imprint upon painters and prompted them to break away from visual schemata felt to be obsolete. Nor is it in the final analysis surprising that the achievements in the two media do coincide up to a point. Contemporary photographic records and painterly abstractions have this in common: they are both remote from the images we have been able to form of reality in a technically more primitive age. Hence the "abstract"