"Photography, Art, and Modernity": What is the "modern" photograph?

One point made by Nesbitt in her article “Photography, Art, and Modernity” that I found thought provoking was the idea that advertising, in a sense, enabled the creation of the link between avant-garde painting and photography. Prior to the beginnings of avant-garde photography, photographs were seen mainly as documents in that they were used primarily by the mass media to advertise and update the public on the most current events. Because the avant-garde aimed to shock the already rapidly modernizing culture, they were presented with the task of presenting the public with even more current ideas than the technologically advanced images that the media had familiarized them with. Avant-garde photography was formed through its opposition to the mass media produced photo-document, but in its opposition it actually embraced the technicality and mechanic qualities found in these photographs and pushed them to a new extreme. Although photography as a medium wasn’t as wholly embraced in the world of avant-garde as painting, it shared the same philosophical basis of its opposition to the mass media. The avant-garde photograph did not try and mimic the qualities already found in avant-garde painting, but instead emphasized and criticized the qualities found in the type of photography that was, at the time, deemed the most “modern”- the document.