I only know 'The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems ' (1974-75) work of Martha Rosler plus the essay, "In, around, and afterthoughts (on documentary photography)." From memory both of these broke with modernism in the exhibition system and modernist criticism (ie., Greenbergian formalism).

These works recognized the art gallery as container and frame, and they aimed at breaking the modernist myth that art was a domain apart from society and immune to politics and power employing strategies planned from positions once on the margins of the art world. Thus 'The Bowery' work deliberately engaged with the traditions of documentary photography”.

The black and white photographs of Bowery storefronts hang adjacent to clusters of typewritten words that are synonyms for the word "drunk." The piece, which avoids depictions of homeless people, subverts documentary photography's assertion of objectivity and accuracy and its traditionally humanist ethos.

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Martha Rosler, Rights of Passage, 1995-1998

The Rights of Passage work is a suite of panoramic photographs of the road, the car, the street, which as the locus of daily experience in the US, shapes our lives and creates dreamscapes that accord with nothing previously imagined. They documens a driver's-eye view of featureless highways and focus on the "no-place" quality of so many modern "public spaces."

The photographs are of the roads she travels to and from her home in Brooklyn. These photographs, taken from inside her car, focus mostly on billboards, to show the urban landscape as largely a site for advertising. The steering wheel, windshield wipers and rearview mirror are cut into and frame the image, as if to circumscribe the mythical freedom of the American road.

Since these series of color photographs of highways, road signage, vehicles transporting goods, and highway construction sites point to the erosion of geography, history, community, and liberty that have result from American -style urbanization, they can be seen as an aesthetics of decay.

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