The modernists have mined the collected photographic work of Wolfgang Sievers to help construct a modernist aesthetic based on asymmetric perspectives.This is what Gael Newton did in Silver and Grey in 1980. What the modernists do is take an industrial shot and construct it as formal beauty:

Wolfgang Sievers Ginninderra Bridge, Canberra, A.C.T., 1977

They then introduce an unusual perspective with its roots in early Eurpoean photographers:


Wolgang Sievers, Mobil and APM buildings off St. Kilda Road, Melbourne, 1960

Then call it art and write about in formal terms.

However, we can view the collected body of Siever's work as an archive of a commercial photographer, which can be carved and represented in a number of ways.

Instead of art constructing the images as aesthetic objects we could construct the images as documentary records, or as historical records of industrial Australia.

David Moore and Rodney Hall's Image of a Nation (1983) was an example of the latter approach of using photographs as a historical record of Australia. This text was a pictorial history that gave the appearance of history itself, rather than being just a form of historical writing. It retrieved a loose sucession of fragmentary glimpses of the past and spun them into a narrative in which the spectator identifies with the camera as a technical apparatus ansd the institution of photography that speaks the truth (the world is like this).