“The photographic process gives us to understand that the real of perception is only a real-effect produced by the free play of images. If photography liberates painting, it does not do so by occupying the most dismal real, abandoning the imaginary to painting; on the contrary, it does so by showing painting that what it believes it paints is a false real, and in dissolving the prestige of perception on which painting believes it nourishes itself. In freeing itself from the real, photography frees the other arts. ‘Perception’ passes into the state of a symbolic support, it is the object of a procedure of symbolization necessary to the freeing-up and the functioning of every blind or irreflexive thought. Like language—the signifier included—in the logical axiomization of the sciences, perception ceases to be supposedly given, it loses its pretension to co-constitute the being of scientific and photographic representation, and it undergoes this symbolic reduction that the new world of images imposes upon it.”

— François Laruelle, The Concept of Non-Photography (1992/2011)