ABSTRACT
Photographic modernism emerged at a time when faith in widespread, technologically assisted cultural development made it increasingly acceptable to think of photography as art. Modernism in photography was premised in part on the idea that an exalted subject was no longer essential for a photograph of it to be a work of art; photographic art could be made from anything by virtue of the individual photographer 's strength of vision. As Susan Sontag has noted, "The most enduring triumph of photography has been its aptitude for discovering beauty in the humble, the inane, the decrepit. At the very least, the real has a pathos. And that pathos is-beauty."1 Alfred Stieglitz's concept of "equivalence" and Cartier-Bresson's te rm "decisive moment"—two theoretical models that gained particular credence within the range of modernist practice-both assume that profound visual statements can emerge from the most ordinary or unexpected subject matter.
