The relations between photography and abstraction are complex and an integral part of its tradition in spite of the commitment to realism and its ontological ties to documentary. This makes it different from the art history conception of modernism as a flawed progress towards ever more purified abstraction and opticality and makes the most figurative and even traditional of photographic black and white languages appear “abstract”.

Federation Square, originally uploaded by poodly.

If abstraction is the removal of one or more aspects to allow the viewer to more closely focus on what you have kept, then in this sense monochrome photography is a form of abstraction: we remove the distraction of color to better concentrate on tone, line and shape.

The modernists assumed that the artist, as someone possessing advanced technical competence in the means of visual production, is, in the service of enlightenment, entrusted with the task of wrenching, tearing or cajoling the beholder's habits of perception out of their ossified, conventionalized, academicized and ultimately falsified norms. This assumption, has been undermined , with the professional definition of 'artist' shaped much less by any convictions about autonomy, special privileges or obligations, and much more by arts interweaving with a multifaceted and all-pervasive media culture, historical amnesia and the commodification of everyday life.

George Baker in Photography and Abstraction in Words and Pictures says that:

We need to rethink the great cliché that modernist art was engaged with the negative, the autonomous, and the abstract while postmodernism has signaled a massive return of popular and representational forms, a return to realism and figuration. Though the question of realism returns with pressing urgency in the moment of the postmodern, its traditional language cannot, no matter the desire of even the most sophisticated of critics to theorize the lineaments of an aesthetic project of "re-figuration" in the wake of modernism's repressions.