The photographer is indeed able to paint directly with his eyes - a fact that is essential in evaluating photography. Photography is a way of practically appropriating reality, a means of knowing and changing the world. To this end, one has to choose that which is generally significant, and eliminate that which is not essential and accidental. The question whether photography can be art has to be answered based on its ability to typologize. The battle against formalism, as expressed in so-called subjective photography and other expressions of the decay of late bourgeois society, is a form of ideological class struggle.
Formalism means the renunciation of representational content.
Subjective photography, as all other formalist pseudo-art, denies the epistemological character of artistic creation. By disregarding content, it necessarily leads to the destruction of photographic form. Formalism clearly fulfills a reactionary class function, in photography as well as in the visual arts. However, it is remarkable that the representational character of photography makes its misuse for formalist experiments more difficult. If a photographer does not use, or does not know how to use the means of typologization, his photograph will be nothing but a mere reproduction of reality, a kind of blue-print of nature.