In her essay "Winning the Game When the Rules Have Been Changed: Art Photography and Postmodernism" Abigail Solomon-Godeau argues that the ideology of mainstream art photography have remained unchanged throughout all its various permutations - stylistic, technological, am! cultural - that it has undergone during its hundred and forty year history.

What has remained unchanged is that art photograph is the expression of the photographer's interior. Implicit in the notion of the photographer's expressive mediation world through the use of his or her instrument is a related constellation of assumptions: originality, authorship, authenticity, the primacy of subjectivity.

The concepts of originality, self expression and subjectivity have, at least since romanticism, been seen as the very core of art, and run through modernism. One of the major claims of modernist art theory was the insistence on the autonomy and purity of the work of art.

Modernism emphasised the primacy of formal organisation and values, the autonomy of the photographic image, the subjectivisation of vision, the fetishising of print quality, and photographic authorship. So we have disputes over the merits of the documentary mode over self expression, and working within an exhausted formalism that can no longer generate either heat or light.

Post­modernist practice, in contrast, hinges on the assertion of contingency and the primacy of cultural codes and it jettisons the values of photography as a creative fine art---the concepts of originality, authorship, authenticity, and the primacy of subjectivity.