The dominant school of the history of photography in Australia is a nationalist historiography that is based on the coherent evolution of photographic artists and an autonomous photography. The classic text is Gael Newton's 1980s Silver and Grey: Fifty Years of Australian Photography 1900 - 1950.

Newton's modernist text is a national history of good art photographs that counters the Eurocentric mode of historiography of Beaumont Newhall, which concentrated on Germany, France, Great Britain and the US. Australia was, and is, on the fringes on this modernist discourse and Silver and Grey is a kind of repressed or disenfranchised discourse that seeks to become incorporated into the "universal" modernist narrative of art photography.

This Newhall school --as it is known--- is a decontextualized history that concentrates on the artistic quality of the photographers. It represented a shift in the historical photographic object from technical developments to the autonomous images themselves that were produced by a canon of photographers considered as artists. All the rest is sociology. The judgement as to which photographers were considered to be artists was done by the historian.

How can there be a coherent evolution --eg., from Pictorialism to Modernism--when a large number of artist photographer have consciously adopted the blur or focusschmocus as a contemporary form of photographic aesthetic?

Is this Newhall model of photographic history-- a history of forms or styles --- in crisis? Has it run out of puff? Do we need a new model of the history of photography? Why not a history of images? If we see photography as a representation to be deconstructed, then this opens up the multiplicity of photographic practices and the diverse social uses of photography.