Ian North begins his talk entitled Spooked! Art Museums, Photography and the Problem of the Real given to the Centre of Contemporary Photography, Melbourne in 2003 by dividing photography into two photographic traditions.
He calls these Reflexive photography or art photography, which has its roots in the formalist photography of the 1970s to the various modes of expression today; and Critical photography, which refers to conceptual photography of the 1970s through postmodernism in the 1980s to present today practices that consciously manifest a critical or ideological edge.
North includes in the reflexive or art photography tradition both the American new colour photography of the 1970s and the New Topographics of Robert Adams and Lewis Baltz.
He adds that the two modes tend to blur in the 1990s with the curators in the art galleries preferring the critical tradition. His argument is that the blurring and cross overs directly challenges the idea of two photographic traditions.
What is surprising is that North doesn't relate this argument to the art debates in Australia over modernism and American formalism. Or to the Antipodeans defence of the Melbourne figurative tradition against both American abstract art (abstract expressionism and geometric abstraction), and the Sydney based abstract painters that include Ralph Balson Grace, Crowley Robert Klippel, John Olsen, John Passmore, William Rose and Eric Smith. So we don't get any sense of what Australian modernism was.
Nor does he mention the abstract or non-representational art produced by influx of émigré artists from Europe in the 1950s in Adelaide, such as Wladyslaw Dutkiewicz who produced a series of abstracts based on the Australian landscape. We have no sense of the tradition of Australian abstract modernism, or its different currents.
Shouldn't art photography in Australia be related to the modernist art tradition (painting); or even to the debates around the Australian preoccupation with nation and national identity and those around the provincialism problem---the belief that it was Australia's distanxce from, and relationship to, overseas cultures that made us unoriginal, derivative and second hand?
This is significant becauseat the time Australian's felt that we could only express ourselves through the inherited forms and categories of others, and that our culture was merely the recapitaulization of something that had been done elsewhere. These debates and concerns are an integral part of our visual culture.