Remember in the late 1970s when contemporary photography, moving away from its journalistic functions, and increasingly conscious of its size and subject matter, began to be made to hang in art galleries and on museum walls. More often that not these large-format canvases were usually ascribed to "artists using photography" rather than photographers (making art).

Did the dynamics of contemporary picture-making changed through the medium of photography's admission to the space of the gallery, and the photographer’s incorporation of that destination into their work?

The photographic “ghetto” no longer exists. Once photography had freed itself from the printed page, where it was accessible to an audience of only one or two people at a time, and was enlarged and elevated---eg., the work of a Jeff Wall and Andreas Gursky, who are known for their elaborately constructed or digitally manipulated photographs--- then issues concerning the relationship between the photograph and the viewer standing before it became crucial for photography as they had never previously been".

Most viewers look at a large photograph on a gallery wall differently than they would look at it in a book, or as a small print. They prepare themselves for a lengthy, meditative relationship with the image. Photography is making people look closely again.

So argues Michael Fried in Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before. He reads art photography's critical value issues as arising from its resistance to the observational, documentary impulse --photography's indexical cohort with reality made explicit in the “observe and record” model of photography.

We can however, locate contemporary art photography in Gerhard Richter and Ed Ruscha, and in artists like Marco Breuer who experiment with photography’s basic materials—and to locate contemporary photography as a whole not only by reference to art, but to the many kinds of scientific, technological, and utilitarian images and their digital and philosophic possibilities.