The novel and the routine ...

... Bryan Appleyard - Blog Archive - Google Street View as Art. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

What we forget, now that millions of digital images are shot every minute of every day, is the shock of photography when it was new. It seemed to capture the real, unmediated by the artist’s hand. This is not quite true, of course; the photographer intervenes at every step from composing the image to making the print. Nevertheless, the magic of chemically capturing something like the real with the click of a shutter clung to the craft until the advent of digital cameras and Photoshop manipulation.