This article was downloaded by: [University of Windsor]On: 18 August 2014, At: 05:49Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: MortimerHouse, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

History of PhotographyPublication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/thph20

Michael Fried's Modernist Theory of PhotographyVered MaimonPublished online: 29 Oct 2010.

To cite this article: Vered Maimon (2010) Michael Fried's Modernist Theory of Photography, History of Photography, 34:4,387-395, DOI: 10.1080/03087291003630139

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03087291003630139

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) containedin the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make norepresentations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose ofthe Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors,and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be reliedupon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shallnot be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and otherliabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to orarising out of the use of the Content.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematicreproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in anyform to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

Michael Fried’s Modernist Theoryof Photography

Vered Maimon

This essay critically analyses Michael Fried’s bookWhy PhotographyMatters as Art asNever Before. It examines the relevance of Fried’s categories of absorption andtheatricality to contemporary photography and his assumption that photographyis an inherently modernist art. In his book Fried explains the shift to large-scalecolour photographs in the 1980s as signalling a return to problems of beholding,which dominated painting since the 1750s and 1760s. In contrast, this essay arguesthat this shift reveals the importance of the legacy of conceptualism and minimalismto recent photography and, in particular, the role of the conceptual ‘document’within contemporary artistic practices.

Keywords: Michael Fried (1939–), Jeff Wall (1946–), Thomas Ruff (1958–), Roland

Barthes (1915–80), medium specificity, theatricality, photography theory

Michael Fried’sWhy Photography Matters as Art as Never Before argues that, with the

emergence, in the late 1970s and 1980s, of large-scale colour photographs that are

made for the wall, ‘issues concerning the relationship between the photograph and

the viewer standing before it became crucial for photography as they had never

previously been’.1 Photography matters as art as never before because with this shift

in photographic practice, photography inherited the problem of beholding – which

Fried analysed in his previous historical books on French painting in terms of the

opposition between absorption and theatricality, and also in his critical writings,

most notably ‘Art and Objecthood’, as the opposition between high modernism and

minimalism.2 Contemporary photography, according to Fried, presents yet another

twist in the dialectical struggle of modernist painting to overcome theatricality after

what seemed to be its final defeat in the 1970s and 1980s with the pervasive

dominance of postmodernism. Thus, while the photographs by all the major artists

discussed in the book, such as Jeff Wall, Thomas Struth, Thomas Ruff, Andreas

Gursky, and Rineke Dijkstra, belong to a ‘single photographic regime’ and represent

‘an epochal development within the history of art photography’, they are understood

by Fried as further continuing ‘the ontology of pictures that were first theorized by

Denis Diderot with respect to stage drama and painting on the late 1750s and 60s’.3

It is clear that Fried’s argument is formulated as both a critical position and a

historical proposition. Previously Fried insisted on an ‘unbridgeable gulf’ between

his historical writings and critical ones, but this book is ‘generically mixed – at once

criticism and history’.4 Moreover, Fried’s previous books focused on painting and

emphasised the idea of medium specificity as a condition for aesthetic value and

quality. Does Fried’s book on photography reconsider his notorious claim in ‘Art

and Objecthood’ that ‘The concepts of quality and value – and to the extent that these

are central to art, the concept of art itself – are meaningful, or wholly meaningful, only

I sincerely thank James Elkins for his

comments on an earlier version of the essay.

1 – Michael Fried, Why Photography Matters

as Art as Never Before, New Haven and

London: Yale University Press 2008, 2.

2 – Fried’s books include: Michael Fried,

Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and

Beholder in the Age of Diderot, Berkeley and

Los Angeles: University of California Press

1980; Courbet’s Realism, Chicago: University

of Chicago Press 1990; and Manet’s

Modernism, or, the Face of Painting in the

1860s, Chicago: University of Chicago Press

1996. Fried’s essay ‘Art and Objecthood’

originally appeared in Artforum, 5:10 (June

1967), 116–47. My references are from the

reprint in Gregory Battcock, ed., Minimal

Art: A Critical Anthology, New York:

E. P. Dutton 1968.

3 – Fried, Why Photography Matters, 2.

4 – Ibid., 4.

History of Photography, Volume 34, Number 4, November 2010

ISSN 0308-7298 # 2010 Taylor & Francis

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f W

inds

or]

at 0

5:49

18

Aug

ust 2

014

within the individual arts.What lies between the arts is theatre’? 5 Diarmuid Costello

argues that Fried’s ‘photographic turn’ marks not a break with his earlier position

but ‘a logical extension of the terms of his early work’, and that ‘Fried’s conception of

medium specificity contains the seeds of its own dissolution’.6 While Fried accepted

Clement Greenberg’s idea that individual arts have distinct essences, he opposed

Greenberg’s assertion that the arts have timeless essences. What defines a medium

according to Fried is not any a priori set of substantive constraints or an ‘irreducible

essence’ (such as flatness). Rather, as he argues in ‘Art and Objecthood’, these are

simply ‘theminimal conditions for something’s being seen as a painting’, yet the crucial

question is ‘what at a given moment, is capable of compelling conviction, of

succeeding as painting. This is not to say that painting has no essence; it is to claim

that that essence – i.e. that which compels conviction – is largely determined by, and

therefore changes continually in response to, the vital work of the recent past’.7 Thus,

at any given moment, painters need to discover the conventions that will compel

conviction and secure the identity of their paintings.8 For Costello this suggests that

what ultimately defines a medium is a ‘structure of artistic intention’ – the way artists

address artistic tradition and the means they employ in order to compel conviction

in the viewer.9

In this reading, Fried’s idea of medium specificity is very broad because, as

Costello argues, ‘artistic media are not defined physically, causally, or ontologi-

cally’,10 but based on their ability to stand comparison with the works from the

past regardless of the specific material or empirical means they employ. Based on this

logic, Costello argues, Wall can intelligibly be defined as a painter while Gerhard

Richter may be viewed as a photographer. Thus although Fried insists on changes

within a specific medium, Costello shows that once time is introduced into the

definition of a medium, ‘the idea of change internal to medium can only mean

internal to a structure of intention operating within and against the constraints laid

down by exemplary past work’.11 The introduction of time thus makes it impossible

to sustain clear demarcations between artistic media because it is not clear what will

count as painting in the future. Rather than distinct media, Fried’s conception of the

medium leads to the idea of a ‘pictorial continuum’ in which painting and photo-

graphy – and in the case of Wall, also cinema – are part of a single set of aesthetic

criteria.12

This interpretation is convincing in so far as Fried mostly refrains from addres-

sing photography as a specific modernist medium in the way, for example, John

Szarkowski defined it in The Photographer’s Eye when he argued for aesthetic ‘con-

cepts’ that are specific to photography.13 For the most part, Fried’s book aims to

show not that photography is a specific modernist medium with distinct character-

istics, but precisely the opposite; that it is amodern art because the new photographic

regime shares the same concerns that underlined painting from the 1760s to high

modernism. Fried thus argues that the solution some artists found to the problem of

theatricality ‘is inconceivable outside the medium of photography’ and that specific

anti-theatrical procedures belong ‘exclusively to the medium of photography’.14 In

fact, he goes as far as to suggest that once photography is understood in this manner

it ‘may be thought as an ontological medium’.15 Yet, he does not explain why

problems of beholding became relevant again at this specific time and why they are

‘staged’ again in photography and not in painting, where they originated. That is,

while his ontological claims about contemporary photography can be understood as

historically specific, they are not presented in the form of an elaborated ‘historical

explanation’ but as a critical demonstration.

Moreover, it is precisely the emphasis on historical continuity and the idea of the

‘pictorial’ that makes the historical claims of Fried’s book problematic. While Fried

argues for a ‘new photographic regime’ and for a major ‘development’ in the history

of photography, he grounds his argument on an ahistorical assumption of a ‘pri-

mordial convention’ that paintings or pictures are made to be beheld, ignoring not

only historical changes in artistic modes of production and reception to which

5 – Fried, ‘Art and Objecthood’, 142

(original emphasis).

6 – Diarmuid Costello, ‘After Medium

Specificity Chez Fried: Jeff Wall as a Painter;

Gerhard Richter as a Photographer’, in

Photography Theory, ed. James Elkins, New

York and London: Routledge 2007, 77–8. See

also Costello’s ‘On the Very Idea of a

‘‘Specific’’ Medium: Michael Fried and

Stanley Cavell on Painting and Photography

as Arts’, Critical Inquiry 34 (Winter 2008),

274–312.

7 – Fried, ‘Art and Objecthood’, 123–4

(emphasis in original).

8 – Costello shows that Fried and Cavell,

based on Wittgenstein, understand

conventions as ‘Rooted in forms of life – that

is, deep and pervasive patterns of underlying

agreement or attunement in the absence of

which we could neither understand one

another nor share a world’. Thus while

conventions are not ‘timeless essences’, they

are also not arbitrary – which explains how

Fried can criticise Greenberg but still hold to

the idea that the arts have distinct essences.

See Costello, ‘On the Very Idea’, 290.

9 – Costello, ‘After Medium Specificity’, 80.

10 – Ibid., 83.

11 – Costello, ‘On the Very Idea’, 311.

12 – Costello, ‘After Medium Specificity’, 80.

This is also what Jeff Wall argues in his

‘Frames of Reference’, Artforum 42:1

(September 2003), 190.

13 – John Szarkowski, The Photographer’s

Eye, New York: Museum of Modern Art

1966.

14 – Fried,Why Photography Matters, 341–2.

15 – Ibid., 347.

388

Vered Maimon

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f W

inds

or]

at 0

5:49

18

Aug

ust 2

014

photography was in part responsible, but also in the status of the beholders and their

relations to the world and to visual forms of representation. As Jonathan Crary

showed in his groundbreaking Techniques of the Observer, what counted as an

observer and as beholding changed significantly in the nineteenth century and

continues to change.16 Most importantly, Crary demonstrated, following Michel

Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, how any notion of an observer, and in particular

the modern observer, cannot be simply located and identified within the realm of art

and models of representation, but has to be seen as directly linked to broad forma-

tions of knowledge and specific practices of power. He thus stated that ‘the observer

is actually just one effect of the construction of a new kind of subject or individual in

the nineteenth century’.17 The idea that there is one model of beholding and an

observer that exists strictly within the realm of art is simply not tenable from a

historical point of view, and the same goes for a transhistorical idea of the ‘pictorial’,

which ignores the fact that history presents many different forms of visual intellig-

ibility. That is, it is only from a very limited (‘art photography’) and inherently

ahistorical perspective (beholding as an unqualified act) that one can argue that

painting, photography and film necessarily share the same set of aesthetic concerns.

While Fried’s historical account is dialectical and not evolutionary, the idea of a

pictorial tradition that finds its fullest contemporary expression in photography

echoes in its logic (not content) the much challenged idea that photography marks

the teleological endpoint of the western tradition of picture-making in term of a

search for resemblance. Fried’s book simply changes the terms of the argument, not

its inherent historical logic: rather than visual verisimilitude, it argues for ‘pictori-

alism’. The philosophical, almost existential, dialectical struggle that Fried now

applies to art photography necessitates, as Stephen Melville has shown, some kind

of a ‘fixed Absolute’, that might be viable as a critical or ethical position but not as a

serious historical proposition.18

In this regard, it is not surprising that Wall’s work receives a privileged place in

Fried’s book and that it proves to be the most amenable to his critical criteria and

historical thesis as well as to his mobilisation of philosophical texts, mainly by

Heidegger and Wittgenstein. After all, Wall’s work is informed by Fried’s modernist

aesthetic categories, while Fried’s own ideas on photography developed in part from

his friendship with Wall. Like Fried’s categories, Wall’s work assumes the same kind

of historical continuity of ‘pictorialism’ as is manifested in his effort to ‘resurrect’ or

‘rehabilitate’ the ‘painting of modern life’ via photography. Thus, as Rosalind Krauss

argues, Wall’s works ‘gaily vault over the unhappy choice modernism gave itself of

either gaining access to pictorial unity at the cost of narrative, three-dimensional

space (unity therefore lodged in the material conditions of the surface), or admitting

that such unity was irrevocably incompatible with the texture of real experience

by means of the strategies of figurative dis-unity vested in collage and photo-

montage’.19 Yet the main issue is whether Wall’s works can function as a ‘meta-

model’ for the other artists’ works discussed in the book; whether the ahistorical

assumption of ‘pictorialism’ that underlines Wall’s practice pertains at all to the new

art photography as a ‘single photographic regime’. In fact, what becomes clear upon

reading Fried’s book is how different the works of Wall, Ruff, Struth, Dijkstra,

Thomas Demand, Candida Hofer and Philip-Lorca di Corcia are from each other,

not simply in terms of individual interests but of aesthetic positions and the way they

engage with issues of historical discontinuity and the legacy of high modernism,

conceptualism and minimalism.

Nevertheless, while Fried in this book still stands behind his ‘primordial’

opposition of absorption and theatricality, he also revises his argument in a sig-

nificant way. Since Fried extracted these categories from Diderot’s writings on

theatre and painting, he needs to explicate what these categories mean in the realm

of photography and film. The distinction between these terms is ontological and rests

on the idea that the beholder and the painting belong to two inherently separate

‘worlds’. For Fried, an object can be viewed as a painting only through belief and the

16 – See Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the

Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the

Nineteenth Century, Cambridge, MA: MIT

1990, 25–66.

17 – Ibid., 14.

18 – In his deconstructive analysis of Fried’s

modernist aesthetic theory, Stephen Melville

shows that while Fried’s ‘story’ of painting is

dialectical and ‘in principle not submitted to

the authority of any Absolute. At the same

time, it is a story that cannot be told except

through the postulation of some Absolute

somewhere’. The absolute, as Melville shows,

consists of the belief that painting can exist in

a ‘pure’ state of anti-theatricality, rather than

recognising its inherent inseparability from

the theatre. See Stephen Melville, ‘Notes on

the Reemergence of Allegory, the Forgetting

of Modernism, the Necessity of Rhetoric,

and the Conditions of Publicity in Art and

Criticism’, October 19 (Winter 1981), 65.

19 – Rosalind Krauss, ‘‘‘. . . And Then Turn

Away?’’ An Essay on James Coleman’,

October 81 (Summer 1997), 28–9.

389

Michael Fried’s Modernist Theory of Photography

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f W

inds

or]

at 0

5:49

18

Aug

ust 2

014

experience of transcendence (what he famously called, in ‘Art and Objecthood’,

‘Presentness’). The experience of painting and aesthetic experience in general are

based on a paradox. In order to attract or ‘enthrall’ the beholder, a painting needs to

establish the fiction of his absence. Absorption thus marks a set of strategies in which

this illusion is sustained, either through the depiction of people absorbed in their

activities or as an artistic effect of dramatic action, whereas in theatricality this

illusion is undone as the beholder is addressed directly or acknowledged. This is a

critical and moral distinction as Fried argues in Absorption and Theatricality:

the very condition of spectatordom, stands indicted as theatrical, a medium ofdislocation and estrangement rather than of absorption, sympathy, self-transcendence; and the success of both arts, in fact their continued functioningas major expressions of the human spirit, are held to depend upon whether ornot painter and dramatist are able to undo that state of affairs, to de-theatricalizebeholding and so make it once again a mode of access to truth and conviction,albeit a truth and a conviction that cannot be entirely equated with any knownor experienced before.20

For Fried, absorption in the painting correlates with the painter’s absorption in the

act of painting and mirrors the absorption of the beholder in front of the work: in

this regard it is also a condition for self-reflexivity.

The question is how these categories pertain to photography and film. In ‘Art

and Objecthood’, Fried argued that:

Because cinema escapes theatre – automatically, as it were – it provides awelcome and absorbing refuge to sensibilities at war with theatre and theatri-cality. At the same time, the automatic, guaranteed character of the refuge –more accurately, the fact that what is provided is a refuge from theatre and not atriumph over it – means that the cinema, even at its most experimental, is not amodernist art.21

And he evokes a similar argument in relation to photography when he states that

because photography is a technology for automatically depicting the world, the sense

of the painter’s absorption in the act of painting over time cannot be achieved in

photography and this makes it is difficult to read it in these terms.22

This is what makes contemporary photography so fascinating to Fried. The way

artists like Wall operate against the grain of this state of affairs by using conventions

from cinema to create a ‘photographic distance’ through which theatricality is no

longer simply avoided but ‘forestalled or undone’.23 Contemporary photography

reinserts theatricality into the experience of beholding by emphasising the artifici-

ality and the deliberate construction and labour that are involved in the making of

photographs, what Fried calls ‘to-be-seenness’, but it does not succumb to it as

minimalism has done. Reopening the problem of beholding thus means not a return

to absorption, a complete sealing of the space of the photograph from that of the

beholder, but an acknowledgment that, after minimalism, it is no longer possible to

sustain the illusion that the beholder is absent. Hence this in-between sense of ‘to-be-

seenness’, where the beholder is aware that things are ‘staged’ in a specific manner for

him, yet is still able to experience the photograph as displaying a separate ‘world’, a

‘tableau’ that exists independently from him. Fried also argues, in his analysis of the

film Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait by Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno

(2006), that the relation between absorption and theatricality no longer needs to

be thought of as one of opposition, but as one of overlapping and displacement.24

And he also argues in relation to the works of the Bernd and Hilla Becher and James

Welling that there is ‘good’ objecthood of real and specific objects as opposed to

abstract and ‘generic’ objects. From this point of view, the problem with minimal-

ism, he states, was that its objects were not real or specific enough.25

Yet, regardless of Fried’s new position that absorption and theatricality are

now mingled, his analysis is conducted in a manner that emphasises, yet again,

the hierarchical opposition between absorption and theatricality. For Fried,

20 – Fried, Absorption and Theatricality, 104.

Hal Foster point outs that with the idea of

‘conviction’, Fried demands devotion for art.

Thus the main threat of minimalism ‘is not

only that it may disrupt the autonomy of art

but that it may corrupt belief in art’. In this

regard, art rather than being separated from

religion art is a ‘secret substitute for the

moral disciplining of the subject that religion

once provided’. See Hal Foster, ‘The Crux of

Minimalism’, The Return of the Real,

Cambridge, MA: MIT 1996, 52–3.

21 – Fried, ‘Art and Objecthood’, 141.

22 – Fried, Why Photography Matters, 50.

23 – Ibid., 13.

24 – Ibid., 230.

25 – Ibid., 304.

390

Vered Maimon

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f W

inds

or]

at 0

5:49

18

Aug

ust 2

014

contemporary photography has an aesthetic value because it is seen as operating

within the still viable, according to Fried, field of modernism. Thus the most striking

feature of his interpretations is the way they downplay how contemporary photo-

graphy has assimilated conceptual and minimalist strategies and models of practice.

Fried is less interested in offering comprehensive interpretations of contemporary

photography than in ‘proving’ that it falls within the anti-theatrical tradition of art.

This becomes most evident in the chapter where Fried addresses Jean-Francois

Chevrier’s important text on the ‘tableau form’. Chevrier argues that the shift in

scale in art photography and the fact that photographs were ‘designed and produced

for the wall’ marks a spectatorial reorientation for photography by inviting ‘a

confrontational experience on the part of the spectator that sharply contrasts with

the habitual process of appropriation and projection whereby photographic images

are normally received and ‘‘consumed’’’. He also emphasises that this implies ‘no

nostalgia for painting’ and that the ‘frontality of the picture hung on or affixed to the

wall and its autonomy as an object are not sufficient as finalities’. The importance of

the tableau form thus consists in the reactivation of ‘a thinking based on fragments,

openness and contradiction, not the utopia of a comprehensive or systematic

order’.26 For Chevrier, the scale of the new photographs and the remobilisation of

the ‘tableau’ form cannot mark a return, however modified, to painting, because any

sense of autonomy that the new photographs communicate is inextricably bound

with their status as ‘objects’. Thus, while for Chevrier the fact that new photography

no longer triggers identification and imaginary projection from the beholder is

simply a way to prevent a sense of interpretative closure and completeness, for

Fried it stands for a necessary and sufficient condition for an ‘ontological’ division

between the ‘world’ of the picture as completely sealed and separate from the ‘world’

of the beholder.

This assumption leads Fried to uncomplicated readings of the works and artists’

texts he often quotes at length. For example, he quotes Jean-Marc Bustamante, who

states:

I wanted not to make photographs that would be art, but art that would bephotography. I refused the small format and the craft aspect of black and white.I wanted to move into color, in a format for the wall, in order to give to thephotograph the dimensions of a tableau, to transform it into an object’.27

It is clear that for Bustamante, as for Chevrier, the tableau is a means to emphasise

rather than ‘overcome’ the object status of his works. This, together with his

resistance to manual craft, the serial nature of his work that is entitled Tableau and

then a number, the fact that his images are of indistinct peripheral sites with no

‘events’, makes his work directly linked to both conceptualism and minimalism.

Consider, for example, his Tableau No. 43 (1981).28 The photograph is structured

around a divide or enclosure composed of identical metal panels that separates run-

down concrete cubic structures and buildings from what seems like an unpaved road

or parking area. In the background, amidst the concrete structures, a woman with

two children appears, while the foreground is dominated by the small pebbles in the

road. There is nothing in the photograph, as Fried states, which invites any imagi-

native projection due also to the fact that its overall sharpness and composition

prevents the viewer from focusing on any specific part, not even on the human

figures that are completely indistinct. Yet, these observations can mean something

completely different from the ‘ontological fact’ that the viewer and the image belong

to different worlds. It can mean a clear correspondence between a visual rhetoric of

equivalence and the subject matter of the image, which is marked by repetition (the

metal panels, the cubic structures, the two children, and pebbles), by a non-

hierarchical order as in the minimalist aesthetic of ‘one thing after another’ that

was meant to internalise industrial forms of production. In fact, it is precisely the

sense of an order that is not simply formal, but also architectural, social and cultural

that provides coherency to the image. That is, it is because the viewer identifies this

26 – Quoted in ibid., 143.

27 – Quoted in ibid., 22.

28 – Ibid., 20.

391

Michael Fried’s Modernist Theory of Photography

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f W

inds

or]

at 0

5:49

18

Aug

ust 2

014

order as an underlining architectural and urban condition (the legacy of the by now

discredited modern functionalist architecture) that the image acquires legibility.

The fact that the term ‘tableau’ is used does not mean that the premises and ideas

that were associated with it in Diderot’s writings are relevant. Fried acknowledges the

importance of minimalism to Bustamante’s photographs, yet he argues that they do

not take ‘the further step that would fully identify them with minimalist objecthood,

whatever that would mean in this context’.29 Yet what his interpretation fails to

register by insisting on the critical opposition between absorption and theatricality is

that Bustamante’s photographs, in their seriality and strict elimination of subjectivity

as a locus of both production and reception, point out that in current artistic

practices the ‘tableau’ has become inextricably bound to the conceptual ‘document’

and the minimalist object. That is, it is precisely the ‘object’ status of these photo-

graphs that make it impossible to associate it with any form of transcendental and

humanistic experience.

Fried wants to find self-sufficient ‘pictures’ in contemporary photography that

compel conviction and belief, yet what he often finds are ‘documents’, not in any

material or empirical sense but in a conceptual and epistemological one. Consider,

for example, his account of Ruff’s Portraits. Ruff insists that his Portraits have no

psychological aspects and that they refuse to function as a projective screen for

viewers’ narratives and experiences. He famously stated that ‘I can only show the

surface’ and that viewers should ‘take the picture as a picture’.30 The last statement

sounds to Fried as ‘a modernist ideal’ and opens a discussion on the relations

between the ‘facingness’ of the photographs, the way their frontal nature is echoed

in their subject matter, which places them ‘firmly in the orbit of painting’ because

‘this is a crucial aspect of easel painting [. . .] that its products hang on the wall and

face their beholders, who typically stand facing them in a relationship of something

like mutual reflection; the frontal portrait as a subgenre makes that relationship only

more perspicuous than it otherwise would be’.31 Yet, what justification is there to

treat Ruff’s photographs as if they were easel paintings, when the most obvious

reference for them, as Ruff himself states, is a specific photographic genre, the

passport photograph that is the emblem of the photographic ‘document’ in the

history of photography? Again, it is only once the history of photography as a form of

social and culture practice is ignored that one can seriously argue Ruff’s Portraits

belong to ‘the orbit of painting’. Yet, with this generic reference in mind, it is clear

that Ruff’s works and statements evoke not the autonomy and aesthetic self-

sufficiently of modernist painting, but what Benjamin Buchloh called, in relation

to conceptual art, an ‘aesthetic of administration’.32 In this regard, ‘to take a picture

as a picture’ means precisely not to ‘behold’ it, but to ‘take’ it as an object by

eliminating any sense of projection or reflection, any form of expression, symbolisa-

tion and transcendence, to create works that intentionally fail to convey

conviction.33

This was also noted by James Elkins, who points out that portraits by Ruff,

Struth, Dijsktra and Beat Streuli reveal something ‘more like a vegetative state than

distraction or even pure unreadable blankness that might, in theory, attend to the act

of being seen’.34 For Elkins this marks the ‘failure’ of the works to stand comparison

with works from the past. Yet, is not this ‘failure’ precisely the condition under which

contemporary art operates today? And in this regard, are not these works emblematic

rather than ‘aesthetically’ deficient? The fact is the face is no longer the site of ‘mutual

reflection’ between painting and beholder, but has become the site (between user and

a computer screen) of ‘dislocation and estrangement’? This has nothing to do with

the specific history of painting and beholding, as Fried seems to suggest when he

attributes the issue of ‘facingness’ to his analysis of Manet’s paintings.35 Instead it has

to do with specific and broad formations of subjectivity and the power relations in

which they are embedded, as Ruff’s photographs suggest when they displace the

‘psychological portrait’ into an enlarged mug-shot that brings to mind institutional

disciplinary requirements of identification and surveillance.

29 – Fried, Why Photography Matters, 23.

30 – Quoted in ibid., 148.

31 – Ibid., 149.

32 – See Benjamin Buchloh, ‘Conceptual Art

1962–1969: From the Aesthetic of

Administration to the Critique of

Institutions’, October 55 (Winter 1990),

105–43.

33 – In a roundtable discussion with Fried,

Krauss and Buchloh that took place at the

Dia Art Foundation in 1987, Hal Foster told

Fried that ‘a primary motive of the

innovative art of my generation is precisely

that it not compel conviction – that is trouble

conviction, that it demystify belief’. While

Foster refers to the art of the 1970s and

1980s, his assertion also points to the fact

that the legacy of minimalism and

conceptualism as well as postmodernism

cannot be ignored in the context of

contemporary photography. See Hal Foster,

ed., Discussions in Contemporary Culture,

Seattle: Bay Press 1987, 80.

34 – See James Elkins, ‘Critical Response:

What Do We Want Photography to Be? A

Response to Michael Fried’, Critical Inquiry

31 (Summer 2005), 953.

35 – See Fried, Manet’s Modernism.

392

Vered Maimon

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f W

inds

or]

at 0

5:49

18

Aug

ust 2

014

As an aesthetic and moral category, absorption was a means through which

painters thought to make their paintings more expressive by communicating a sense

of psychological interiority and inwardness. In contrast, what is communicated in

contemporary photographic portraits is not any sense of interiority or ‘ontological’

self-sufficiency but blankness, a radical sense of ‘voidance’ or absence, yet not of the

humanist beholder, but of the modern subject as an agent of expression, action and

meaning. It is in this sense that the conceptual ‘document’ has become an ‘episte-

mological horizon’ within which contemporary art operates.36 And it is Ruff’s work,

in particular his recent works where he manipulates and enlarges images that he

extracts from the Web, that best attest to this.

Consider, for example, Ruff’s latest series of jpegs, which is composed of large-

scale photographs that appear blurred and pixelated. Are these best addressed as

recalling ‘the pointillist structure of neo-impressionism’ as Fried suggests?37 A

strictly formalist point of view cannot provide an adequate interpretation for these

images because it ignores the source and content of these images (all are ready-made,

low-resolution web images and many are of disasters like the burning of the twin

towers), as well as the way they are produced. As Bennett Simpson argues, ‘it seems

impossible to view Ruff’s photographs as pictures without simultaneously viewing

them as processes. Their content stands for their condition’.38 The very fact that they

are named after a compression format for digital photographic files and are sampled

from the web ‘archive’ suggests precisely the condition of the document that acquires

its status independently from an ‘author’, and, rather than displaying ‘skill’, exhibits

the conditions of its production and classification, in this case as media images. It is

the epistemological tension between transparency and opacity in the photographic

document that interests Ruff. Its intensified circulation in books, newspapers or web

pages, on the one hand, and its inherent ‘muteness’ or ‘blankness’, on the other,

which triggers the ‘work of meaning’ but also defies it.

By enlarging these images and displaying them as pictures, Ruff suggests not

‘pictorial’ autonomy but a radical sense of cultural heteronomy, the fact that the

‘document’ is no longer simply a conceptual strategy but has become a historical

condition for any form of artistic and cultural practice in the current age, regardless

of the fact that it could be enlarged and hung on the wall like a picture. This only

emphasises the inseparability of different modes of beholding (pornographic, com-

mercial, social and aesthetic) from a wide range of visual forms of intelligibility.

Fried’s book stretches the categories of absorption and anti-theatricality in a way

that fails to point to a historical difference. Sometimes his insistence on the impor-

tance of beholding is perplexing and exposes the fact, against his intentions, that

these categories might not be applicable to photography at all or that they are only

relevant in a highly compromised state that completely evaporates their critical

viability. In his analysis of Gursky’s work, for example, Fried argues that the sense

of distance achieved through the use of the telephoto lens functions as a ‘severing

device’ and negates the ‘very possibility of reciprocity’ between not only the viewer

and the human subjects that are depicted but also between him and the picture itself,

thereby ‘declaring the picture’s antitheatricality – also its autonomy or self-

sufficiency – in quintessentially photographic terms (a painting with comparably

small tiny figures [. . .] would have nothing like the same import)’.39 The condition

for experiencing Gursky’s photographs as comprehensive and self-contained wholes

is thus mainly technical or ‘automatic’, their overall focus, level of sharpness and

detail leading to a ‘disembodied photographic ‘‘seeing’’’ and to a situation where ‘the

picture is free to pursue truly ‘‘abstract’’ ends’.40 Yet, if the condition for the

autonomy of the picture is technological, how can it mark an ethical or moral

‘ontological’ separateness? Does the use of technology ‘automatically’ signal an

ontological claim? If in Gursky’s photographs absorption is mainly a technical effect

(also of digital manipulation) as opposed to an artistic one, how are they different

from films in which there is a ‘refuge’ from the theatre but not a ‘triumph’ over it? If

there is no technical and perceptual possibility of reciprocity, how can the viewer be

36 – Consider the many exhibitions, since

Documenta 11 (Kassel 2002), which

significantly marked this concern, on the

‘document’ and the ‘documentary’ in

contemporary art; for example, Archive

Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary

Art, International Center of Photography,

New York 2008; and The Greenroom:

Reconsidering the Documentary and

Contemporary Art, Bard College’s Center for

Curatorial Studies and Hessel Museum of

Art, Annandale-on Hudson, New York 2009.

37 – Fried, Why Photography Matters, 154.

38 – Bennett Simpson, untitled text, in

Thomas Ruff: Jpegs, Aperture 2009, n.p.

39 – Fried, Why Photography Matters, 158.

40 – Ibid., 165.

393

Michael Fried’s Modernist Theory of Photography

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f W

inds

or]

at 0

5:49

18

Aug

ust 2

014

avoided? ‘Severing’ the viewer is something much stronger than creating the ‘illu-

sion’ that he is absent. In the latter the viewer is a factor in the representational act,

while in the other he is not. In this regard, Gursky’s photographs are untheatrical or

non-theatrical not anti-theatrical. Fried is aware of this when he states ‘that absorp-

tion in Gursky is consistently ‘‘flat’’ or mechanical; nowhere is it perceived to imply

the least inwardness or psychic depth on the part of his human subjects’.41 Yet, if this

is the case, then what is the critical currency of the term in relation to Gursky’s work?

How, if it became so ‘flat’, can absorption function as a mean of ‘sympathy’ or

transcendence? And if it became another mean of estrangement, then its critical

feasibility seems to be completely voided.

A similar problem also arises in Fried’s analysis of Roland Barthes’s Camera

Lucida where absorption becomes ‘ontologized’. Fried suggests reading Barthes’s

concept of the ‘punctum’ in terms of anti-theatricality, as a detail that should not be

seen as intended for the viewer. For Barthes, the condition for the experience of the

‘punctum’ is that it will be seen but not shown as if intentionally arranged by the

photographer. The ‘punctum’ is thus a detail that was part of the photographic event

and that the photographer could not photograph. This for Fried marks an anti-

theatrical claim, a demand that it will ‘carry within it a kind of ontological guarantee

that it was not intended to be so by the photographer – a requirement that goes well

beyond anything to be found in Diderot’.42 Fried also interprets Barthes’s elabora-

tion of the ‘punctum’ as an experience of temporal intensity – looking at Alexander

Gardner’s portrait of Lewis Payne taken before his hanging for his part in Lincoln’s

assassination with the thought ‘he is going to die’ – as a ‘guarantor’ of anti-

theatricality because ‘the sense of something being past [. . .] cannot be perceived

by the photographer’.43 Yet, the sense of temporal non-coincidence between present

and past is something that happens in every photograph: this is what for Barthes

marks the ontological specificity of photography. Does that mean that all photo-

graphy, like cinema, is by its ‘nature’ anti-theatrical? The same goes for the unin-

tended detail that comes out of the fact that photography is an ‘automatic’ form of

depiction, thus potentially every photograph can have an unintended detail.44 For

Barthes this does not constitute a problem because the ‘punctum’ is conceptualised

by him as irreducibly subjective – it is not the detail that counts, but its unique effect

on a specific individual. Thus all photographs have the potential to trigger the

experience of the ‘punctum’, but in reality only specific ones do because of the

beholder’s particular psychological disposition, biography, etc. Barthes’s text

assumes not ‘the beholder’ but a highly specific one – himself. Fried’s analysis

awkwardly ‘translates’ Barthes’s explicitly non-theoretical engagement with the

relations between a specific viewer and individual photographs into a general aes-

thetic theory of anti-theatricality that insists on the ‘autonomy’ of pictures. It is one

thing to argue that photography is an ontological medium (as opposed to an artistic

one) because of its specific indexical relation to the real, and another to argue that it

is ‘ontologically’ anti-theatrical. Barthes’s claim is not aesthetic or evaluative – in

fact, it is meant to oppose the aesthetisation of photography – while Fried’s is. Again,

what is at stake is the critical viability of anti-theatricality as an aesthetic and moral

category. If it is not conceptualised an intended artistic effect, how can it offer valid

value judgements with regard to works of art?

Fried’s categories work best when they are significantly modified not stretched –

for example, in his brilliant analysis of Thomas Struth’s family portraits, which are,

needless to say, very different from Ruff’s because they still preserve, even in a

vanishing mode, some notion of self-contained and autonomous subjectivity.45

What makes his interpretation fascinating is the way it effectively mobilises the

idea of ‘to-be-seeness’ as an in-between category that works against the grain of

both portrait photography’s inherent theatricality (the fact that subjects look at the

camera) and the medium’s automatic non-theatricality. Fried points out that in

Struth’s portraits, subjects are not exhibited or posed by Struth but position them-

selves and that they are asked to look at the camera, and not at Struth, who does not

41 – Ibid., 173.

42 – Ibid., 102.

43 – Ibid., 104.

44 – This is also argued in James Elkins‘s

essay ‘Critical Response’, where he shows

that Fried’s interpretation of Barthes’s

‘punctum’ requires him to address different

kinds of photographs, not merely artistic

ones that include ‘unintended details’. In this

regard, his interpretation cannot support

any notion of an ‘aesthetic autonomy’ with

regard to photography.

45 – On Struth’s family portraits, see

Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, ‘Portraits/Genre:

Thomas Struth’, in Thomas Struth: Portraits,

Munich and London: Schirmer Art Books

1997, 150–62.

394

Vered Maimon

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f W

inds

or]

at 0

5:49

18

Aug

ust 2

014

stand behind the camera. Struth also intentionally prolongs exposure time and takes

many shots. Struth’s portraits productively link the place an individual assumes in

the psychological entity of the family with the way he consciously presents himself to

the camera. Each portrait thus presents two complementary axes, Fried argues, a

lateral one lies within the picture and relates to the relations between the family

members, and an orthogonal one of the frontal gaze that extends from the picture to

the viewer. While the family axis ‘is marked by unawareness’, the ‘axis of address is

indeed marked by awareness of being photographed’. Thus ‘the logic of absorption is

such that the more intense the sitters’ commitment to that process, the more

oblivious they necessarily are to the all-embracing network of family relationships’.46

Here the experience of absorption is tied to the fact of being seen in a way that

suggests not a feeling of interiority but an intense sense of concentration in externa-

lisation. Fried makes a similar convincing argument with regard to Dijkstra’s por-

traits that operate in the gap between intention and effect, between the subjects’

concentration on their external appearance and their concentration on the camera,

and what is revealed about them despite or because of their awareness. Fried’s

analysis is persuasive because, rather than extending anti-theatricality in an ahisto-

rical manner, he recognises the new historical conditions of posing and beholding.

It is clear that current photography no longer functions as a ‘theoretical object’

that in the context of postmodernism, as Krauss states, led to the eclipse of the idea of

the medium. Faced with photography’s obsolescence in the face of digital imagery,

Krauss and Fried seem to argue for opposed roles for contemporary photography.

Krauss argues that against the background of the ‘post-medium’ condition, ‘photo-

graphy functions against the grain of its earlier destruction of the medium, becoming

[. . .] a means of what has to be called an act of reinventing the medium’.47 Focusing

on the work of James Coleman, she shows that it is precisely because of its obsoles-

cence that photography can open ‘redemptive’ and imaginative capacities within the

technological support that will not function ‘as a revival of itself or indeed of any of

the former mediums of art, but of what Benjamin had earlier spoken of as the

necessary plurality of the arts’. Krauss thus remobilises the idea of the medium in

order to get away from any ‘unified idea of Art’.48 Fried, on the other hand, suggests

that contemporary photography proves (ontologically), yet again, his modernist idea

of medium specificity, understood now not in terms of empirical constraints but of

‘artistic intention’ and a general ahistorical notion of ‘pictorialism’. Photography

thus matters as art because it proves the values of high modernism and reclaims the

possibility of aesthetic autonomy. Yet, regardless of these differences, both still attach

the critical viability of photography to the idea of the medium, however modified

and revised. The question is whether this is a productive way to deal with the role of

photography in contemporary art, in which it is now more bound with what Jacques

Ranciere calls ‘the partition of the sensible’; that is, with problems of ‘truth’ and

‘fiction’ and with the opening of new horizons of intelligibility and visibility.49 The

question of the medium is only slightly relevant to these concerns because current

artistic practices, in their emphasis on the staging and enactment of events and

concern with activism, no longer operate under the premises of the ‘great divide’

between modernist and postmodernist theories of art and photography. In this

regard, it is not always clear whether Fried’s book presents an effort, by seriously

addressing photography and the idea of ‘to-be-seenness’, to move beyond the ‘great

divide’ or to further entrench it.

46 – Fried,Why Photography Matters, 202–3.

47 – See Rosalind Krauss, ‘Reinventing the

Medium’, Critical Inquiry 25 (Winter 1999),

296.

48 – Ibid., 305 (original emphasis).

49 – See Jacques Ranciere, The Politics of

Aesthetics, trans. Gabriel Rockhill, London

and New York: Continuum 2004. On the

significance of Ranciere’s work to recent

theoretisations of contemporary art, see

Artforum (March 2007), 252–85. See also

Vered Maimon, ‘The Third Citizen: On

Models of Criticality in Contemporary

Artistic Practices’, October 129 (Summer

2009), 85–112.

395

Michael Fried’s Modernist Theory of Photography

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f W

inds

or]

at 0

5:49

18

Aug

ust 2

014