Rackham on Photo Illustration

Even as far back as a century ago, magazines were beginning to use photographs to illustrate stories and poems. Arthur Rackham, sensitive to the threat that the art of photography posed to him as an illustrator, challenged the practice:

“Now your work, all your work, should be regarded as a work of imagination, as art. You are not copying-clerks or phonographers or recording angels. Yet there is some tendency now to illustrate even poetic works and fiction by photographs. Surely to place before your readers…the actuality you had before you when writing, is ruthlessly to rub off all the bloom of imagination, of temperament, of personal view, of atmosphere, which are your chief, your only, great claim to consideration.”

--------
from James Hamilton's biography of Arthur Rackham