Gerry Badger, in his review in Creative Camera of an exhibition of Lee Friedlander's work at the Victoria and Albert Museum entitled Out of the Cool (1991) expresses the backlash against art theory---ie., the semiotic approach to photography--that emerged in the 1970s. He says:

According to much current photographic theory, driven by the imperatives of a teaching and academic art establishment that seeks concrete meaning and positive purpose in a photographer, the somewhat meandering, casually contingent, intimate impulse of the diarist would seem anathema. This is the age of the ‘project’, the conceptually driven rather than perceptually driven body of work. Anything which cannot be predetermined, defined publicly prior to shooting, then explicated publicly in a treatise after shooting, is deemed to be substantively wanting and socially suspect, damned by a retrograde tendency to individualism and the private, atavistic doodlings of modernism. The new breed of photographers, heeding the dictates of this orthodoxy, propose and execute their concept orientated ‘projects’ with a will, the worst of them forgetting that art has visceral as well as cerebral qualities, the best of them soon casting aside the theoretical crutch and continuing to do what photographers have always done – marking their perceptual connections with the world.