Pointing out your casual redefining of English to suit yourself is neither emotional or gratuitous. Particularly when you are so happy to castigate other posters for doing the same thing. It's hardly our fault you've tripped yourself up.
But you don't want to discuss the topic anymore, and only post diversions to distract from what has been said.
What was said is that Garry Winogrand, an authoritative source. on multiple occasions and in various ways stated that photographs are not reality, are not the scene photographed, and (his word) are an illusion.
You say Winogrand is wrong, stating "illusion is the wrong word. Representation is what should be used." But you are not the authoritative voice that Winogrand is...
Apparently your disagreement is actually with Winogrand rather than with me, but my pointing out the actual connotation of the words (within the standard dictionary definitions, not contradicting them) seems to be just as misunderstood by you as Winogrand's statements. Incidentally, Rudolf Arnheim, another authortative source, related this to Gestalt psychology and said art is "not simply an imitation or selective duplication of reality, but a translation of observed characteristics into the forms of a given medium" (Film as Art, Arnheim). Which is to say not so much a representation of reality as an illusion of it.
Regardless of how poorly you might understand English word usage, that isn't the topic here. Photography and the analysis of photographs is the topic.. Specifically this thread is about Reichmann's article. In that light I'll toss in another clinker to think about, which is how to relate Picasso's Cubism with photography, in theory, as a philosophy, and in practice.
Take into account that images, whether they are made with a pencil, a paint brush, or a photographic process are at the base level a form of visual communications. Then consider the concept of entropy in communications, as was defined by Claude Shannon in his revolutionary 1949 paper "A Mathematical Theory of Communications" which vaulted the world into the Information Age... with the same concepts that perceptual psycologist Rudolf Arnheim applied to visual art in a 1971 essay "Entropy and Art". That's a lot of background to soak up before the use of a more universal set of symbols to paint a picture with (i.e., Cubism) can be related to the more restricted set of visual symbols available to photographers.
But if one does compare the type of visual symbols used in Cubist painting to the visual symbols in photography, the use of PhotoShop to make them more universal and illusional, as opposed to being a more literal representation, becomes an academic subject rather than an emotional one. And just as Picasso advanced the art of painting with his techniques, photographers applying the same theory will advance the art of photography too.
It's Gestalt psychology applied to production of art with a camera! We can't put an eye on the shoulder of a model the way Picasso did, to make sure it was noticed, but we can do a lot of things to rearranged "the heirarchic scale of importance and power by which some structural features are dominant, others subordinate" (Arhheim) in a way that very definitly makes the whole greater than the sum of the parts in the illusion we call a photograph.
