The “simplistic” way of interpreting the series structure in this case would be by the lowest common denominator, as the purely Formalistic reading of any group of pictures, without any thought to their interrelation or historical context. By this reading, any single newspaper page’s unrelated illustrations would be sufficient to constitute a “series”, but of course that’s not what the traditional series structure via Evans, Frank, etc, was ever about. Rather, I think that Blank is pointing towards the teleology and narrative structure inherent in the series as it was established throughout the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries via reportage – thus his citations of Urformen Der Kunst, Life Magazine, and so on.

Blank confirms this when he goes on to cite Ruscha as the turning point, whose photobooks attacked that classical series structure by purposely and ironically adopting exactly that simplistic, lowest-common-denominator approach of a random, meaningless subject (ex. gasoline stations), repeated a random, meaningless number of times, thus showing that the only meaning inherent to the traditional series is that which is socially assigned to it by its makers and viewers. Of course Hans Peter Feldmann, Sarah Charlesworth, and Thomas Ruff then went on to assail the newspaper page itself too, in related critiques.

So clearly, Blank’s use of iterated subject matter, like pointlessly endless groupings of fireworks, doesn’t at all attempt the same thing the classical series does. As he said quite plainly himself: “I have several hundred pictures of fireworks, for example, but it would be ridiculous to think of such a flat-footed mass as a ‘series’”, and “the natural proliferation of photographic images, though—their force in numbers—can’t and shouldn’t be simply ignored, so the question remains how we might leverage that multiplicity in a way that affords the creation of new meanings and possibilities.”

Charles, likewise, I think that any substantial reading of photography over the last forty years takes these kinds of critiques into account. See “Marks Of Indifference” for the longer view, too much to be reflected upon in depth here. But suffice it to say that with the onset of Conceptualism, the classical paradigms of the series simply could no longer hold. This has been one of the primary motifs of photographic criticism for decades.