This is looking back to the work of Wolfgang Sievers and more specifically to his photographs of the Adelaide Festival Theatre. Sievers was a modernist Australian photographer who specialized in industrial photography and whose design roots lay in the Bauhaus. Sievers wanted to show that Australia was an advanced industrial nation rather than a producer of raw material and agricultural products; that industrial technology could be humanized; and that the craft work of photography produces art objects that express the vision of the artist.
The key text here is Bernard Smith's European Vision and the South Pacific. In this text Smith argued that European generated concepts and visual design are not simply imported and assimilated, but are also transformed by the experience of the regional culture into a hybrid form, which in turn informs the national tradition. The originality lies in the interpretation of the overseas influences and concepts as expressed in the work produced within Australia. Unlike the US no institutional offshoot of the Bauhaus was established in Australia, and so the worn-out pre-modern design clichés of traditionalist Australia remained locked into place. The modernist style--- that is, geometry of form, clarity, sharp angles and straight lines--- only emerged in the 1960s. This was 40 years after the Bauhaus was first established in Weimar Germany by Walter Gropius, with its emphasis on founding a new utopian language of colour and form.
The American formalist modernism of Clement Greenberg overlaid this 'new way of seeing' with an emphasis on the concept of medium specificity. In his texts Greenberg argued that there were inherent qualities specific to each different artistic medium, and part of the modernist project involved creating artworks that were more and more 'about' their particular medium. Abstract modernism in the higher arts (ie., painting and sculpture) represented a withdrawal from reality to pursue their self-reflexive exploration of formal problems, whilst photography was left to get on with its routine (pre-modernist) task of picturing the world.
John Szarkowski argued the modernist case for art photography as a specific medium by outlining the specific characteristics of the medium in The Photographer's Eye. These unique characteristics---the thing itself, the detail, the frame, time, and vantage point---- differentiate the photographic medium from other visual art-forms such as painting or printmaking. Photography for the American formalists was a specific type of medium with its own seeing and aesthetic.
This formalism offered straight photography a bridge into the art gallery and art market; into a world where style was the means of histyorical evaluation and the autonomy of art was translated into a space constituted by discrete objects linearly hung on austere white walls to be viewed by the gaze of the disinterested spectator. Modernism became the official culture of the art institution--galleries, magazines, market, academia--- and it defined the agenda for institutional collecting, exhibiting, research and scholarship and histories.