“It’s sort of an obvious point but, if you think about it, the photographs that are used on postcards are all excellent images. So it’s not a term that you should use to slag off a photograph. Most photocard shots are taken from a position slightly more elevated than the subject. Whoever first figured that out was a real genius, in my opinion.”
Nakamoto, Moriyama, How I Take Photographs (p.109, 2019)
“Through absence of color, three-dimensionality and motion, the black-and-white photography is ipso facto ‘unnatural’. It expresses reality symbolically: gray tone values instead of color, two-dimensional projection (perspective) instead of space, blurredness or single-phase instead of constant motion. It is ‘symbolic’ in the same sense that speech and writing are, where sounds (words) are symbols for objects and conceptions, and signs (letters) are symbols for sounds (words). Photography means ‘reproduction’ only in the rare cases where the rendering of a two-dimensional, black-and-white object is the aim; otherwise it must be called a translation.”
Andreas Feininger, Feininger on Photography (1949, pp.195-196)
Crafting Pixels 