The essence of the artist's virtue is respect for the medium. There is no art without a medium, which disciplines the artist's creativity to the limitations of perception. The medium is the way in which the artist builds a bridge between possibility and actuality, between the formative imagination and an object that results from an effort to express that imagination in the public world. Art is inherently tragic, evincing a surplus of imagination over the object. Artistic works that fulfill the imagination are few and far between. The distance between imagination and object is narrowed by respect for the medium or, more deeply, a love for working within its limitations that, through concentration, reveal its strengths.
In no art as much as photography has critical theory focused on the medium. As Siegfried Kracauer has noted: "Throughout the history of photography there is on the one side a tendency toward realism culminating in records of nature, and on the other a formative tendency aiming at artistic creations. ''1 Realism, which has always been the protagonist in theory of photography, is based on the special possibility of the photographic medium to record plausible facsimiles or simulacra of the data of possible visual perception. At the inception of photography its inventors and advocates were most impressed by its reproductive capability. Indeed, they often believed that it was a mirror of visual nature, a conceit which has been steadily worn down over a century and a half. Yet despite the obvious distance between a fiat image on a piece of paper and a full visual perception, realism has hung on tenaciously, trading on the stubborn independence of the object photographed from the photographer's control. The core of realism is the contingency of what is photographed in relation to the photographer's creative will or direction.
At least it is possible for the object of photography to be made contingent to the act of photographing. Formativism joins the debate as a genuine contestant because it is also possible, through a multitude of means, for the photographer to manipulate the photographic situation so that it yields an