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22 INTRODUCTION
rest, whether they result from high selectivity or amount to purely mechanical products like the aerial reconnaissance photographs.
Fox Talbot called it one of the "charms" of photographs that they include things unknown to their'maker, things which he himself must discover in them.83 Similarly, Louis Delluc, one of the key figures of the French cinema after World War I, took delight— aesthetic delight— in the surprising revelations of Kodak pictures: 'This is what enchants me: you will admit that it is unusual suddenly to notice, on a film or a plate, that some passer-by, inadvertently picked up by the camera lens, has a singular expression; that Mme X . . . preserves the unconscious secret of classic postures in scattered fragments; and that the trees, the water, the fabrics, the beasts achieve the familiar rhythm which we know is peculiar to them only by means of decomposed movements whose disclosure proves upsetting to us."84 The aesthetic value of photographs would in a measure seem to be a function of their explorative powers.*
In our response to photographs, then, the desire for knowledge and the sense of beauty interpenetrate one another. Often photographs radiate beauty because they satisfy that desire. Moreover, in satisfying it by penetrating unknown celestial spaces and the recesses of matter, they may afford glimpses of designs beautiful in their own right.
The issue of art
At this point the controversial issue of whether or not photography is an art comes into view again. The controversy in its present form is strongly determined by the unwillingness of the champions of creativity to put up with the limitations which the photographic process imposes upon their formative urges. They consider any photographer who is following the photographic approach something less than an artist and, on their part, revolt against the recording duties he readily assumes. The issue, as they see it, could not be more poignantly characterized than by MoholyNagy's definition of the experimental photographer as an artist who "will not only select what he finds but . . . produce situations, introduce devices so far unused and neglected, which for him contain the necessary qualities of photographic expression/'85 The emphasis is on the elimination of accidental reality for the sake of art. Barbara Morgan, who builds a universe of
* Valery, Degas, dance, dessin, p. 73, remarks that, in the case of flying birds, instantaneous photographs corroborate the prints of Japanese artists. For the resemblances between instantaneous photography and Japanese art, see Wolf-Czapek, Die Kinematographie . . . , pp. 112-13.