Interesting to see how photography has constantly reworked itself, sometimes appearing as uniquely capable of objectively showing the world, other times appearing as imaginative, artistic, and subjective. Photography and Modernism Photography is often regarded as the archetypal modernist mode of representation, one which has been naturally in tune with the changes brought about as modernism swept through so many areas of culture in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. However, we'll find that photography can also take other paths. It is not necessarily bound to the fragmentary instant. It can also speak a more holistic pictorial language.
Pictures necessarily have frames.
You cannot show everything. You have to select. The trick in classical painting is to downplay the violence of the frame, to make it appear as a natural and coherent border to a self-contained scene or event. All of these factors contribute to the sense that each image depicts a coherent unified scene. The images become metaphors for totality.