Photography is of course an analytic, not a synthesizing, medium: photographs arecommonly produced all-at-once, as light strikes a piece of film.21 This is unlike the other visual arts, where paintings and related kinds of pictures (including the most rapidly sketched drawing), are built through a process of accretion, stroke by stroke. Writers, too, even thevmost fluent, parallel these synthesizing procedures as they shape their texts one draft after another, but their practice at least suggests that of photographers, since it involves, in part, an editing process applied to words — and, by extension, to the things that words signify. As W.H. Auden put it, “it is both the glory and the shame of poetry that its medium is not its private property, that a poet cannot invent his words,”22 an observation also true when applied to photography and the photographer’s inability to invent his “worlds.”
