Is it Art?
I read the Masius De Zayas essay, at first I thought he was trying to shoot down the idea of photography being art, but on re-reading I perceive that he was trying to place paintings in a box and propose that photography had somehow gone beyond what conventional art was capable of. His language and rhetoric are very old fashioned and reminiscent of a colonial Britain divided by Class, However, his ideas about photography having two aspects: The documentary show it as it is the style of facts and the Photo art style of imagined and staged photography. This seemed to me to resonate with the idea of photo fact and photo fiction I discovered during my DPP studies.
Read more here: Exercise 1.4