It is commonly accepted that though many artists deploy photography for critical commentary on all sorts of issues in society, the modernist appropriation of documentary photography within the gallery and museum art context has caused a rethinking of this mode of practice and its traditions and legacy in the 1970s.
This form of resistance starts from the view of photographs as common cultural artifacts rather than privileged art objects for the art market, thereby positioning the photos on the margins of the art institution and highlighting how an image's possible meanings are produced within an economy of statements and discourses.