Traditionally, photography has been seen as a mere reflector of surface appearance or as producing images of reportage which ostensibly provide empirically verified and verifiable information.The counterpoint to this naturalism, or realist art forms modeled on the traditional truth claims of photography, is the Romantic conception of the photographer as seer, using their imagination to transcend empirical reality and express inner truths.

In the early twentieth century the Russian formalists offered another conception of photography that undercut these traditional (19th century) conceptions of photography ---the adoption of bizarre perspectives and point of views to make normal things and relationships look strange. This has the effect of heightening our perception of an habitually understood object or concept, thereby enabling us to see things differently.

Viktor Shklovsky developed the concept of ostranenie or defamiliarization in literature in "Art as Technique". He invented the term as a means to distinguish poetic from practical language arguing that poetic language is fundamentally different than the language that we use everyday. he explained the idea of defamiliarization thus:

The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar’, to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object; the object is not important.

Art photography after modernism can retain its realist aesthetic by dumping reportage and shifting to 'making visible' socio-economic structures and relationships which are not immediately given in sense perception. So it can represent those essential societal relations that would otherwise remain hidden from view. This is what Bertolt Brecht and Walter Benjamin argued.