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January 18, 2009
Michael Fried's Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before refers to the “new art photography”, which begins when it takes its full place upon the wall much in the same manner as painting, and now carries the history of painting along with it.The contemporary artists working in photography (include Jeff Wall, Thomas Struth, Thomas Ruff, Rineke Dijkstra, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Thomas Demand, and Hiroshi Sugimoto).
Rineke Dijkstra, Brighton, England, 1992 from Beach Portraits series
Beach portraits is a series of pictures featuring adolescents posed at the water’s edge. Her subjects are shown standing, facing the camera, against a minimal background. Some of the images have an elemental quality to them: what Barthes called a "punctum" (a subjectively conspicuous detail that takes you out of the frame into some, mostly likely ineffable and personal, truth of life, and establishes a direct connection between you and the subject in the photograph.
Fried argues that this location of art photography immediately compelled photographers to grapple with issues centering on the relationship between the photograph and the viewer standing before it, which until then had been the province only of painting. The central claim of Fried’s book is that in the ’70s and early ’80s, when artists began producing very large photographs for wall display, photography “inherited” the problem of beholding as Fried had described it. For Fried, everything hinges on whether the work of art feels staged or not, and whether that staging is necessary in order to establish the presence of the work in question.
For Fried “art degenerates as it approaches the condition of theatre.” Theatricality in art interferes with presentness, with the potential for a transcendent experience of the work itself. Theatricality refers to a staging that requires and presupposes the presence of an audience in order to have ontological certainty regarding the presence of the work. Dijkstra's portraits are staged in this sense.
Fried's concern is with the problems of beholding and he suggests the problem arises in the division between "theatricality", when a picture looks deliberately outwards and declares itself to an anticipated audience, and "anti-theatricality", when the elements of a picture are constructed without any visible concession being made to an audience; or even to the idea of an audience, and the figures within the image belong to a world of their own – in other words, when the work does not require the audience's participation to make it complete.
Fried's argument is that because the photographic tableau emerges in the wake of Minimalism and of new concerns about voyeurism and the inherently contaminating effects of beholding, it must acknowledge what Fried terms “to-be-seenness” even as it must continue to resist theatricality.
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Joel Colberg, at Conscientous, has a review of Fried's ' Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before. He doesn't say much about Fried's theory.
Fried's book Colberg says:
No mention of Fried's ideas. No mention of modernism, or Fried's ideas about purity of the image and rejection of literature. A large part of Colberg's "review" is a rejection of continental philosophy.The book, he says:
Colberg says he belongs into the latter camp but gives no reason why Heidegger is baloney and of no relevance to contemporary art photography.