The Interior Landscape

14   Spirituality, Sensuality, and Mechanics

Those who have only a superficial knowledge of the possibilities of our art contend that the photographer is a mere mechanical realist without power to add anything of himself to his production. Yet some of our critics inconsistently commit themselves to the statement that some of our pictures are nothing like nature. This is giving themselves away, for if we can add untruth we can idealise. But we go further and contend that we can add truth to bare facts.

—Henry Peach Robinson

Art, by most formal definitions, is an expression of human skill and creativity. Representational photography—photography aiming literally to re-present appearances as a random person would likely see them—may seem on ...