Writing about 1930s writers he referred to as ‘the stark realists’, V. S. Pritchett commented on what he believed to be the habitual and unwelcome intrusion of sentimentality into modern novels:

The confidence with which Pritchett wields the multiple photographic metaphors used to describe both the strengths and the flaws of modern fiction suggests an intimacy between the two modes – even if only in terms of goals rather than technique – that was ubiquitous and would have been immediately understood by his readers. The equation of the novelist to ‘the new story camera man’ is striking, but by the mid-1930s there was nothing unusual about such a comparison; it was commonly assumed that what modern novelists were producing, especially when they were writing about cities, was equivalent to modern photography. The aim of the present book has been to elucidate what this proximity between fiction and photography meant in practice, beyond the generalised comparisons. On the one hand, if ‘photography’ is mainly a metaphor for a literary mode, then what kind of a literary lineage can be said to have influenced it? And on the other, what were the affinities between the two art forms, and, crucially, what kind of photography can the period's urban fiction be said to have resembled or imitated?

The equation between the photographic and the effortlessly (or lazily, depending on a critic's perspective) mimetic has a long history, going back to nineteenth-century fiction and the considerable hostility towards the instantaneous reproducibility of the real that greeted the emergence of photography. In this sense, comparisons between ‘the stark realists’ and camera men were meant as straightforward gestures of disapproval; as John Taylor points out, ‘[a] relative innocence in the 1930s about the conditions of mediation and the currency of imagery meant that both film and photography were still believed to be the source of raw, unmediated sights’.