A Cake Company
Linear continuity, where one thing follows another in logical sequence, is no longer an appropriate model for describing our relationship to the world and to culture. Today the only adequate way of expressing this relationship is through the arrangement and combination of elements in space. When collage and related spatial techniques were introduced in the early twentieth century, artists rebelled from established concepts of painting and sculpture, renouncing the route of predictability and easy explanations. The medium of photography, because of its technical possibilities, soon became party to the process of questioning through its use of retouching and photomontage. But the achievement of effects unknown to traditional photography depended on redefinition of accepted notions of framing and focus. At the origins of these photographic manipulations, then, lay both aesthetic and political motivations — reasons of the head and of the heart.
Because the photographer must frame, shoot, develop and enlarge the image, what the photographer did became almost as important as what was produced. From there it was an easy step to other forms of intervention, particularly of a creative type. The “constructed” nature of photography, its combination of mechanical and manual elements, also pushed imperceptibly in this direction.
— Denis Lessard, The Manipulated Photograph