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18 INTRODUCTION
shadows and the chairs affect one as elements of a free composition rather than natural objects.
Unsettled borderline cases like these certainly retain a photographic quality if they suggest that their creators are devoted to the text of nature. And they are on the verge of losing that quality if the impression prevails that the photographer's "finds" merely reflect what he has already virtually found before training his camera on the external world; then he does not so much explore nature as utilize it for a pseudo-realistic statement of his own vision. He might even manufacture the coveted coincidence between his spontaneous imagery and actuality by slightly tampering with the latter.
The experimental photographer tends to trespass the border region marked by these blends of divergent intentions. Are his products still in the nature of photographs? Photograms or rayographs dispense with the camera; and those "creative" achievements which do not, radically consume —by molding it— the recorded raw material possibly going into them. The same holds true of photomontage.68 It might be best to classify all compositions of this type as a special genre of the graphic arts rather than photography proper. Despite their obvious affiliations with photography, they are actually remote from it. Indeed, as we have seen, the experimental photographers themselves assert that their prints belong to a peculiar medium and, being artistic creations, should not be confused with such quasi-abstract records of reality as are, perhaps, no less attractive aesthetically.69 But if these creations are no records, they do not fall into the dimension of paintings or drawings either. James Thrall Soby once remarked of them that they do not "wear well when hung as pictures."70 It is as if the use of photography for strictly artistic purposes led into a sort of no man's land somewhere between reproduction and expression.
Affinities
Photographs in keeping with the photographic approach— where no misunderstanding is possible, they may just be called photographs— show certain affinities which can be assumed to be as constant as the properties of the medium to which they belong. Four of them call for special attention.
First, photography has an outspoken affinity for unstaged reality. Pictures which strike us as intrinsically photographic seem intended to render nature in the raw, nature as it exists independently of us. Now nature is particularly unstageable if it manifests itself in ephemeral configurations