"Until recently, until photography came onto the scene, art was an additive process. Then photography came along. The advantage of photography was that you went out, and you were at the mercy of what you found. That's a very different thing than building an image element by element, constructing the composition. In the photograph, everything matters. Not just the featured star of the picture, the subject, but a background over which you really have no control. And the emphasis here is discovery, and the multitude of ways things can be deeply interrelated, and yet go unobserved. His assertion was that this was photography's real advantage. The photograph is able to synthesize what is before the camera in a way that we, ourselves, cannot. The beauty of this synthesis would be that it is a reintroduction to reality. No one view better than another, but fresh, something we could have never dreamed up. Sommer would later say that it was enough to come home with a sliver of experience, a sliver of reality, that would already be miraculous."

-Emmet Gowin, speaking on the ideas of Frederick Sommer