In her essay "The Armed Vision Disarmed: Radical Formalism from Weapon to Style" in Richard Bolton, ed., The Contest of Meaning: Critical Histories of Photography (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1989) Abigail Solomon-Godeau asks: "What, if anything, made the Chicago Institute of Design based formalist practice similar to, or different from, the indigenous American variety—that is, purist, straight photography—exemplified by Paul Strand after 191S and the f/64 group in the following years?

She says that there were common grounds in the two formalisms—shared convictions, for example, that the nature of the medium must properly determine its aesthetic and that photography must acknowledge its own specific characteristics.

Deriving ultimately from Kantian aesthetics, Anglo-American formalism insisted above all on the autonomy, purity, and self-reflexivity of the work of art. As such it remained throughout its modernist permutations an essentially idealist stance. Such concepts, as well as related notions of immanence and transcendence, with the parallel construct of the promethean artist....

[It was] the continued emphasis placed on experimentation.... that made I.D. photography rather different from American art photography of the 1950s and 1960s. Whether through the encouragement of color photography or through the various workshop exercises utilizing photograms, light modulators, multiple negatives, photo-etching, collage, and so on, I.D. photography encompassed a broad range of photographic technologies and experimentation that distinguished it somewhat from the dominant purist notions of East and West Coast art photography....

The very notion of the artist-photographer producing images for a knowledgeable or peer audience was essentially at odds with the dynamic, public, and functionalist concept of photography sanctioned by the German Bauhaus. For Moholy, the pedagogical system of the Institute of Design was conceived literally as a training program, a vocational system that would prepare designers, architects, and photographers to go into the world and in some vague, Utopian sense transform it.

The latter Institute of Design--under Harry Callahan from 1946 and Siskind from 1951--- embraced a subjectivized notion of camera seeing and Callahan exemplify the committed art photographer; equally aloof from marketplace or mass media, content to teach and serve his vision. Photography was a medium of subjectivity. The battle to legitimate photography as art had been consistently waged in terms of the camera's ability to express the subjectivity and unique personal vision of the photographer, and with the postwar valorization of individualism, detachment, and originality, art photographers returned again to their historic agenda.

It embraced Anglo-American formalism assumptions that art photography, at its highest level, represented the expression of a privileged subjectivity, and the use of the formal and material properties of the medium to express that subjectivity. This formalism, which sustained the best work of a Callahan or a Siskind, has run its course and it became a cul-de-sac.