The Arcades Project - Operi

advantages to boot especially where photographing faces is concerned although
the portraits which one makes with them are doubtless much poorer than before.
With the older less light-sensitive apparatus multiple expressions would appear
on the plate which was exposed for rather long periods of time; hence on the final
image there would be a livelier and more universal expression, and this had its
function as well. Nevertheless, it would most certainly be false to regard the new
devices as worse than the older ones. Perhaps something is missing from them
which tomorrow will be found, and one can always do other things with them
besides photographing faces. Yet what of the faces? The newer devices no longer
work to compose the faces-but must 'faces be composed? Perhaps for these devices
there is a photographic method which would decompose faces. But we can be
quite sure of never finding this possibility realized . .. without first having a new
function for such photography." Brecht, Versuche