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The difference between The Last Supper and the greatest of modern photographs is that Da Vinci's painting is a product of the imagination. The picture came from inside Da Vinci, just as Hamlet came from inside Shakespeare. Photographs come from the outside; the camera artist sees something memorable in the world about him, and seizes it from the stream of time into a flat and shadowy sort of permanence. His picture is not so much created as caught. Photography can and often does produce great things without the intercession of genius (many of the finest World War II pictures were made without human guidance, by automatically triggered cameras).
Defenders of photography as a true art form retort that no work of art is possible without, to some extent, copying outside models, or without the intervention of some accident—the chance ray of light on a sitter, the stray bit of dialogue overheard in the street. The photographer uses his artistic imagination by choosing his subject, by lighting and posing it, by emphasizing some details and cutting out others. But photographers are forever haunted by the technical ease with which they can reproduce reality. Almost since photography began, they have been alternating between the "fever of reality" and cold chills which sent them shuddering away from reality.
The Beginning. The trouble is well illustrated by the case of Weegee (real name: Arthur Fellig), an inspired news photographer. When he first went to work for Acme Newspictures in 1923, he never got the plushier assignments, because he refused to wear a necktie. Later, he freelanced for several New York papers, and saw the big city as it had rarely been seen before, with a clear but compassionate eye for its brutalities, follies and tender moments (some of the results were published in a successful photo book called Naked City). He would cruise Manhattan all night. Explains Weegee: "Good pictures are like blintzes. You gotta get them while they're hot . . . It's gotta be real."
Then something happened to Weegee. He began wearing neckties. He went arty. He started experimenting with a strange lens he had developed that put four eyes into the Mona Lisa's face, two heads on the Statue of Liberty, and considerable additions on to Marilyn Monroe's naturally exaggerated figure. His former fans are disappointed in him. Reality is no longer enough. "Got tired of the old line," he says. "Changed my act."
Like Weegee, almost all serious photographers have believed at one time or another that "it's gotta be real"; like Weegee, they have a frequent urge to "change the act."