I realize of course that in raising the question of subjectivity I am reviving the central debate in photography's aesthetic history, that between the straight and manipulated print, or the many variations on that theme. But I do so here in order to point out that the recuperation of the aura for photography would in fact subsume under the banner of subjectivity all of photography, the photography whose source is the human mind and the photography whose source is the world around us, the most thoroughly manipulated photographic fictions and the most faithful transcriptions of the real, the directorial and the documentary, the mirrors and the windows, Camera Work in its infancy, Life in its heyday. [...] At the origin of everyone there is an Artist and therefore each can find its place on the spectrum of subjectivity. For is has long been a commonplace of art history that realism and expressionism are only matters of degree, matters, that is, of style.
Douglas Crimp, from the essay "The Photographic Activity of Postmodernism"
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