The  return to the past--to a historical artistic culture of  the 20th century -- is a precarious one: in seeking stimulation from the past we are in danger of being overwhelmed by it, and that   we become epigones—a copy or a replica---and caught up in nostalgia.  We can also make creative use of history by fashioning new metaphors/images to fashion a  provisional  visual vocabulary for the present.

 What immediately stands out in looking back on this journey into a photographic/visual  culture  is how  the digital disruption  has  changed the way we look at images. They have become disposable, easy to make, and  there has been an explosion  of images on the internet.  With the digital camera photography has been thrust into our visual culture at an impossible to keep up with. Though film based or analogue photography--- in its different forms-- belongs to a different era  it survives as a niche practice and a form of resistance to a mass digital culture. 

What then stands out is  the way that artists are reprogramming existing work, inhabiting historical styles, making use of images, using society as a catalog of forms and investing in fashion and media. These practices have in common the recourse to already produced forms. They testify to a willingness to inscribe the work of art within a network of signs and significations, instead of considering it an autonomous or original form. The already existing materials is the data to build their practice on and so we have a new culture of reusing the existing. 

Behind this lies a highly sophisticated  commodity culture with  its strong semiotic dimensions (goods as “meaningful”); its marked differentiation of consumption from production; its aggressive assault upon hitherto “sacred” realms such as art, education, and religion; and its need to confront the intense popular resistance this assault brought on. There is simply no way to opt out of commodity culture of a consumer society. 

 Art, including art photography, becomes a cultural resistance to a commodity culture  in that it is premised on a refusal to allow exchange value to become the standard for judging art. After 1980 the idea of an avant-garde as an aesthetic or artistic challenge to the commodification of art or to commodity culture generally ceased to make much sense in the  Australian  context. The problem becomes one of finding ways to live with a commodity culture  critically.