Although it has spread enormously, nothing essentially new has been discovered in the principle and technique of photography since the process was invented. Every innovation since intro­duced — with the exception of X-ray photography — has been based on the artistic, reproductive concept prevailing in Daguerre's day (c. 1830): reproduction (copy) of nature in confor­mity with the rules of perspective. Every period with a distinc­tive style of painting since then has had an imitative photo­graphic manner derived from the painterly trend of the moment.

------Men discover new instruments, new methods of work which revolutionise their familiar habits of work. Often, however, it is a long time before the innovation is properly utilised; it is ham­pered by the old; the new function is shrouded in the traditional form. The creative possibilities of the innovation are usually slowly disclosed by these old forms, old instruments and fields of creativity which burst into euphoric flower when the innova­tion which has been preparing finally emerges. Thus for example Futurist (static) painting stated the problem of simultaneity of movement, the representation of the time impulse — a clear-cut problem which later brought about its own destruction; and this was at a time when the film was already known but far from being understood. Similarly the painting of the Constructivists which paves the way for the development on the highest level of reflected light composition such as already exists in embryo. We can also regard — with caution — some of the painters working today with representational, objective means (Neo-Classicists and painters of the 'Neue Sachlichkeit' movement) as pioneers of a new form of representational optical composition which will soon employ only mechanical and technical means — if we disre­gard the fact that these very works contain tradition-bound, often plainly reactionary elements.

------In the photography of earlier days the fact was completely neglected that the light-sensitivity of a chemically prepared sur­face (glass, metal, paper, celluloid, etc.) was one of the basic elements of the photographic process. This surface was never re lated to anything other than a camera obscura obeying the laws of perspective, for fixing (reproducing) individual objects in their special character as reflectors or absorbers of light. Nor were the potentialities of this combination ever sufficiently consciously exploited.

------For if people had been aware of these potentialities they would have been able with the aid of the photographic camera to make visible existences which cannot be perceived or taken in by our optical instrument, the eye; i.e. the photographic camera can either complete or supplement our optical instrument, the eye. This principle has already been applied in a few scientific exper­iments, as in the study of movements (walking, jumping, gallop­ing) and of zoological, botanical and mineral forms (enlarge­ments, microscopic photographs) and other investigations into natural history; but these experiments have remained isolated phenomena, the interconnections of which have not been estab­lished. We have hitherto used the capacities of the camera in a secondary sense only. This is apparent too in the so-called 'faulty' photographs: the view from above, from below, the oblique view, which today often disconcert people who take them to be accidental shots. The secret of their effect is that the photographic camera reproduces the purely optical image and therefore shows the optically true distortions, deformations, foreshortenings, etc., whereas the eye together with our intellec­tual experience, supplements perceived optical phenomena by means of association and formally and spatially creates a concep­tual image. Thus in the photographic camera we have the most reliable aid to a beginning of objective vision. Everyone will be compelled to see that which is optically true, is explicable in its own terms, is objective, before he can arrive at any possible subjective position. This will abolish that pictorial and imagina­tive association pattern which has remained unsuperseded for centuries and which has been stamped upon our vision by great individual painters.

We have — through a hundred years of photography and two decades of film — been enormously enriched in this respect. We may say that we see the world with entirely different eyes. Nevertheless, the total result to date amounts to little more than a visual encyclopaedic achievement. This is not enough. We wish to produce systematically, since it is important for life that we create new relationships.