I'm just trying to understand what you're saying: so my question was not which authority figures might have said something like that, but have we narrowed what we mean by photographers or what we mean by surrealists to make that statement work?
I don't know if you are addressing me or Amolitor, to try to answer this, first let's look at Sontag's quote,
"Surrealism lies at the heart of the photographic enterprise: in the very creation of a duplicate world, of a reality in the second degree, narrower but more dramatic than the one perceived by natural vision."
I think the definition needs to be that of "surrealism" rather than photography. The root of the word is "sur" (beyond) "realism", and I think it is this precise definition, rather than an art movement, that Sontag refers to. IMO, one cannot accurately consider photography to be realistic. In a conversation about realism in photography, Picasso supposedly looked at a photograph of David Douglas Duncan's wife, and observed, "she's very small, isn't she". Not until photography becomes life-sized,three-dimensional 360x360 degree solid holograms can we practitioners even pretend to deal in a realistic medium.
Enough words... I'm going to go shoot!
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