The Heroism of Vision Summary and Analysis

Photographs discover beauty; even banal or vapid objects are made beautiful by being photographed because in the conventional wisdom only beautiful things are photographed. Thus, photography manufactures beauty. However, photography also makes truly beautiful things seem cliché through over-exposure. It is therefore imperative to constantly be discovering new sources of original beauty. This, fortunately, is simple because the very act of photographing something new casts it as something new and beautiful. Cameras often reveal beauty that is not normally seen; the photograph manufactures the beauty.

Photography enjoyed an enormous boost in popularity when it became public knowledge that photographs could be retouched, altered, or tampered with. The photographic portrait need not capture and immortalize transient defects—photographs can mingle documentation with artistic rendering. Another method of falsifying photographs is to falsely caption them. False...