Tracing the many differences made to literary and artistic production more generally by photography, photomechanical reproduction, and cinema, this chapter considers some exemplary cases in the history of the visual arts in America. Considering Alvin Langdon Coburn’s work with Henry James and Ezra Pound, it ponders how canny this photographer was in promoting the photographic arts in relation to the existing pantheon of the arts. Turning to look at the photomechanical mediation of the news, it wonders what difference it made to see mass-reproduced photographic illustrations on a daily basis, and consider it newsworthy – what this change augured for the way writers and artists understood reality itself. Josep Renau’s photomontage work is examined as one example; the work of John Dos Passos another; the photo-essay form yet another. The chapter concludes with a survey of cinematic means of representation and their disintegrative effect on older aesthetic notions of unity, organicism, and consistency.