I know very little about Charles Swedlund, the American photography who worked in the mid-1950s, and whose roots were in the formalist world of the Illinois Institute of Design that was founded in 1937 in Chicago by László Moholy-Nagy as the New Bauhaus. Apparently, he taught at Southern Illinois University - Carbondale

The New Bauhaus was the single most influential school for photography and design in mid-twentieth century America, and its photography teachers were Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind.

Moholy-Nagy's enthusiasm for photography was predicated (at least in the 1920s) on his conviction that the machine age demanded machine-age art: functional, impersonal, rational. Formalism for Moholy signified above all the absolute primacy of the material, the medium itself. Thus if photography, and indeed a photographic processes including film, was defined by its physical properties— the action of light on a light-sensitive emulsion.

The camera was privileged precisely because it was a machine, and camera vision was privileged because it was deemed superior to normal vision. Herein lay the total reversal of terms that had historically characterized the art versus photography debate. "The photographic camera," wrote Moholy, "can either complete or supplement our optical instrument, the eye."