‘Fragment, experiment, dissonant prologue’: modernism, realism and the photodocument John Roberts Quaderns portàtils 2 3 4 the photograph (as against its discursive and systematic production) is ultimately assumed to be a confirmation of photography’s transcendent relationship to its original conditions of production. In short, post-war photographic modernism reduces the early avant-garde’s alliance between realism and modernism to a kind of superfluous residue, as evidence of an unworkable partisanship.