The anti-aesthetic position in photography forfeits originality, uniqueness and self-expression whilst preserving photography as an autonomous aesthetic object whilst reintroducing the context of the  photograph when produced. 

Critics like Rosalind Krauss use a positivist understanding of photography (passive, non artistic, copy) to move beyond the traditional notions of artist/author (creative genius), the formalist modernist conception of a medium, and the art historical categories of oeuvre.

However, the anti-aesthetic position reduces aesthetics to modernist formalism, when the latter is a particular kind of aesthetics based on Greenberg's reading of Kant. Thus Hal Foster, in the preface to The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture,  says that:

Anti-aesthetic"...signals that the very notion of the aesthetic, its network of ideas, is in question here: the ideas that aesthetic experience exists apart, without "purpose," all but beyond history, or that art can now effect a world at once (inter)subjective, concrete, and universal--a symbolic totality. Like "postmodernism," then, "anti-aesthetic" marks a cultural position on the present: are categories afforded by the aesthetic still valid? ..."Anti-aesthetic" also signals a practice, cross-disciplinary in nature, that is sensitive to cultural forms engaged in a politic (e.g., feminist art) or rooted in a vernacular--that is, to forms that deny the idea of a privileged aesthetic realm.(p.xv)

Foster sees "the aesthetic" as a single monolithic set of categories and he ignores the differences within the tradition of philosophical aesthetics.