I'm down at Victor Harbor for this week to start the ball rolling on large format photography. Photography matters for me. But why? One attempt an answering is Michael Fried in his Why Photography Matters As Art As Never Before; a text concerned with exploring the importance of contemporary tableau photography—defined as large-scale photographs intended to be hung on walls and viewed as painting. It rejects the narrow view of photography – the idea that the camera is a recording device, not a creative tool, and that its product is strictly representational – not manipulated, not fabricated, not abstract …

The issue here is not that the photographs of Jeff Wall, Jean-Marc Bustamante, Thomas Struth, Thomas Ruff, Andreas Gursky, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Luc Delahaye, Beat Streuli, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Rineke Dijkstra, Patrick Faigenbaum, Roland Fischer, Thomas Demand, Candida Höfer, James Welling and Berndt and Hilla Becher are necessarily better art than those of their predecessors, but that it is in these pictures that some of the most interesting critiques of representation of the last 30 or 40 years have taken place: that it is these artists’ engagement with certain artistic and philosophical ideas that distinguishes them.

The book begins at the point in the late 1970s when contemporary photography, moving away from its journalistic functions, and increasingly conscious of its size and subject matter, began to be made to hang in art galleries and on museum walls. These large-format canvases were usually ascribed to "artists using photography" rather than photographers (making art).Most viewers look at a large photograph on a gallery wall differently than they would look at it in a book, or as a small print. They prepare themselves for a lengthy, meditative relationship with the image. At this point, Fried argues, contemporary art photography inherited "the entire problematic of beholding".

According to this claim, 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. The antithesis of theatricality is absorption. In his usage of these terms, if a work acknowledges, addresses, or otherwise includes the beholder, it’s theatrical; if it’s self-contained and self-sufficient, it’s absorbed. The paramount aim of modernist painting in the 1960s, according to him, was to defeat theater.

Photography matters, Michael Fried argues , because it has become the place where a certain crisis of the picture inaugurated in the late 1960s has played out most meaningfully. This crisis was enunciated clearly in the title "Art and Objecthood." Is a certain thing art or an object? The ontological nature of photographic representation as it has been understood in the last thirty years or so--that it is indexical, baring the physical traces of the thing it represents means that it has become a medium uniquely charged with the task of overcoming its seeming belonging to the world of objects. Up until the mid-1970s, making art photography meant denying the indexical nature of the medium and prioritizing the pictorial surface, something that has come under enormous pressure for a variety of reasons.

To make art from photography today means instead to accept the indexical nature of the medium and to find ways of establishing photography as a properly pictorial, that is to say artistic, form of representation.