An formalist modernist aesthetics holds that the photographic medium has gradually been coming to an historical consciousness of itself as a form of picture making, or snapshot-aesthetic pictures of Gary Winogrand, which celebrate ordinary events, and transforms them with precise timing and framing into astute visual commentaries on modern life.

So this looks very old fashioned as it pays little attention to what is not centred:

Gary Sauer-Thompson, Agtet, Suzanne, Ari, Clare 2006

In contrast, Gary Winogrand's images do not place his main figures in the foreground of a tautly arranged setting. In Winogrand's pictorial convention the main figure is sliced by the edges of the frame, or surrounded by acres of unexceptional space, or perched in the middle distance while some quizzical extra hoggs the center of the picture.

Portraits are seen as conservative genre of art. They are a long way from the work contained in William Eggleston's Guide, in which every detail matters and the picture is based on the expressive possibilities of the colour and the detail.

Gary Sauer-Thompson, Suzanne, 2005

These portraits have allegiances to more traditional forms of picture making. People are comfortable with portraits--or rather a picture with a figure or an object in the middle of the frame. People want something obvious from photography and protraits gives them that. They don't care all that much about composition, space, colour, line.

Gary Sauer-Thompson, Suzanne, 2005

Some formalists say that the photograph has nothing to do with the content. The pictures are about content (they mean something as pictures) and also simultaneously about photography, for the two issues are not supplementary but coextensive.

In his Introduction to William Eggleston's Guide John Szarkowski says that:

Most color photography, in short, has been either formless or pretty. In the first case the meanings of color have been ignored; in the second they have been considered at the expense of allusive meanings. While editing directly from life, photographers have found it too difficult to see simultaneously both the blue and the sky.