Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before

385 Pages·2008·63.737 MB·English

by  Michael Fried

introduct ion
Each answer remains in force as an answer only as long as it is rooted in
questioning.
Heidegger, "The Origin of the Work of Art"
J have always liked photography, and in a low-key way I was always interested in ir. I
bought a Berenice Abbott prim of an Arget bedroom ar rhe Willard Gallery in New York
City more than rhirry years ago, and have lived for a long rime with photographs by
Evans, Baldus, Frith, and O'Sullivan (a particular favorite). Over rhe years, too, I
attended numerous exhibitions of photography, though rarely with rhe sense of urgency
rhar I felt with respect to exhibitions of modern painting or sculpture. Bur unril recently
I did nor have any strong intuitions about photography, and without such an intuition
- some sort of epiphany, real or imagined - I have never been motivated to write on any
thing. Then several things happene d. First, I got ro know James Welling and his work
because friends in Baltimore walked inro his first show at Metro Pictures and bought
several of the "Diary" photographs; soon they became close to him. l found that I liked
his photographs enormously, and we, too, became friends. And then about ten years
ago, by sheer chance, I mer Jeff Wall at the Boymans Museum in Rotterdam and dis
covered that, to put it mildly, we were interested in many of rhe same pictorial issues.
I had been aware of Wall's work for years and had even had an inkling of our shared
concerns, bur meeting him and exchanging rhoughrs was galvanizing for me. From that
moment on I starred looking seriously at recent photography, a process greatly aided by
major exhibitions of work by figures such as Welling, Wall, Andreas Gursky, Thomas
Struth, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Thomas Demand, Rineke Dijkstra, Candida Hofer,
Hiroshi Sugimoto, and Luc Delahaye, among orhers. To my surprise I fairly quickly
became gripped by the thought rhat all rhar work, and much else besides, hung together
artistica lly in ways rhat it seemed to me no one else writing about the topic had quite
recognized . At that poinr, I began drafting whar J hoped would be a short book on
recent art photogra phy that would convey rhe gist of my thinking. Pretty soon, though,
ir became clear that no such short book was in the cards. Rather, if I wanted to do
justice to my subject, I would have to deal with the work of more than fifteen photo
graphers (and, ir rurned our, video and film makers) in sufficient detail to convey a sense
of what each was up to and at rhe same rime to allow the connections I saw among
rheir individual projects ro emerge. This is what I have tried to do in Why Photo
graphy Matters as Art as Never Before.
introduction
The basic idea behind whar follows is simple. Srarring in rhe lare , 970s and 1980s,
arr phorographs began ro be made nor only ar large scale bur also - as rhe French criric
Jcan-Fran~ois Chevrier was the firsr ro poinr our - for the wall; this is widely known
and no one will conresr ir. What I want ro add is rhar the momenr rhis rook place - I
am thinking, for example, of Ruff's passporr-sryle porrrairs (which begin modesr in scale
bur are marked from the srarr by rhe for-rhe-wallness thar Chevrier rightly regards as
decisive), Wall's firsr lighrbox transparencies, and Jean-Marc Busramanre's Tableaux -
issues concerning rhe relationship berween rhe phorograph and rhe viewer sranding
before it became crucial for phorography as they had never previously been. More pre
cisely, so I wanr ro claim, such photography immediarely inherited rhe enrire problem
aric of beholding- in rhe rerms defined in my previous writing, of rhearricaliry and
anrirheatricaliry - rhar had been cenrral, first, to rhe evolution of painring in France from
rhe middle of the eighteenth cenrury unril rhe advenr of Edouard Maner and his gener
arion around 1860, an evolurion explored in my books Absorption and Theatricality,
Courbet's Realism, and Manet's Modemism; and second, co rhe opposition between high
modernism and minimalism in rhe mid- and lare 1960s, as expounded in, and perhaps
exacerba red by, my "infamo us" essay "Arr and Objecrhood. » 1
Whar rhis has meant in individual cases will become clear in rhe course of rhis book,
bur I might as well acknowledge at the outser rhat my morivation for writing abour
recent arr photography has everything ro do wirh my belief that issues of rhe sort I have
jusr named rhar mighr have seemed (rhar did seem, ro me as much as ro anyone else)
quire possibly forever invalidated by the eclipse of high modernism and the triumph of
posrmodernis m borh arrisrically and rheorerically in the 1970s and 'Sos have returned,
may I say dialectically, to rhe very cenrer of advanced phorographic pracrice. Pur slightly
differently, I shall rry ro show rhar the mosr characteristic productions of all rhe photo
graphers jusr mentioned (and others as well) belong ro a single photographic regime,
which is ro say ro a single complex srrucrure of rhemes, concerns, and represenrarional
srraregies, which on rhc one hand represents an epochal development wirhin rhe hisrory
of art phorography and on the other can only be understood if it is viewed in the context
of issues of beholding and of what I rhink of as rhe ontology of pictures rhar were first
theorized by Denis Diderot wirh respect to stage drama and painting in rhe lare 1750s
and '6os. This means, among other things, thar rhe chapters that follow constantly refer
ro my own earlier writings; I declare rhis up front, ro preempt the facile criticism rhar
I am excessively preoccupied wirh my own ideas. I am preoccupied wirh those ideas, for
the simple reason rhar rhey seem ro me ro hold the key ro much (far from everyrhing,
much less rhan half of everyrhing, but srill, a grear deal) in the picrorial arts of rhe pasr
2.50 years. The quesrion, in orher words, is nor whether in rhis book I am exploring
ropics and issues I have discussed before bur rather whether Ill)' interpretations of spe
cific works by a number of rhe leading phorographers of our rime, and beyond rhar my
account of the larger project of much conrempora ry arr photography, are or are not per
suasive as rhey srand. (I know ir is roo much ro ask, bur it would be useful if readers
impatient wirh whar I have done were ro feel compelled ro offer superior interprerarions
of rheir own.)
why photography matters as art as never before
The organizat ion of Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before is as follows.
Chapter One sketches three possible "beginn ings," each of which involves three terms,
by way of indicating something of the scope of the issues to be dealt with in subsequent
chapters . Chapters Two and Three are concerned with works by Jeff Wall; the first also
says something about the concept of worldhood as it is theorized in Martin Heidegger's
Being and Time {also about the notion of technology as developed in his later essay
"The Question Concerning Technology") and the second about the concept of the every
day as it emerges in a remarkable extract from Ludwig Wittgenstein's notebooks for
1930, both of these in relation to Wall's pictures. {For various reasons, Wall's work plays
a larger role in this book than that of any other photograp her.) Chapter Four comprises
a reading of Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida, with particular attention to his notion
of the /Junctum; my aim is to show that Camera Lucida is everywhere driven by an
unacknow ledged antitheatr icalism and that it therefore bears a close relationship to the
larger argument of this book. Chapter Five examines Thomas Struth's museum pictures,
and Chapter Six a range of works by Thomas Ruff, Andreas Gursky, and Luc Delahaye.
Chapter Six also includes a brief discussion of Chevrier's account of the new "tableau
form," one of the few significant contribmions to a theory of the new art photography
with which I am familiar. Chapter Seven, on photographic portraiture, considers Struth's
family portraits, Rineke Dijkstra's beach photographs, Patrick Faigenbaum's busts of
Roman emperors, Delahaye's L'Autre, a book of black-and-white photographs made
with a hidden camera of passengers on the Paris Metro, Roland Fischer's portraits of
monks and nuns, and Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno's film Zidane: A Twenty
First Century Portrait. Chapter Eight, organized around the theme of street photo
graphy, examines Wall's Mimic, Bear Streuli's videos and phorographs of crowds made
with a concealed camera, and various pictures and a photobook by Philip-Lorca diCor
cia. Chapter Nine looks at works by Thomas Demand and Candida Hofer before closing
with brief remarks about Hiroshi Sugimoto's "Seascapes," Struth's "Paradise" photo
graphs, and two gatherings of photographs of animals in zoos by Garry Winogrand and
Hofer. Chaprer Ten, the climax to the book, begins with a few words about James
Welling's early Polaroid photograph, Lock, by way of setting the scene for an inter
pretation of Bernd and Hilla Becher's Typologies, one of the most original and impres
sive - also, I shall try to show, philosophically one of the most profound - artistic
achievements of the past fifty years. Notions of "true" or "genuine" versus "bad" or
"spurious" infinity as put forward by G. W. F. Hegel in his Science of Logic and Ency
clopedia Logic are central to my argument, as is the theme of objecthood in "Art and
Objecthood ." The chapter ends with a brief reading of Wall's Concrete Ball. There
follows a Conclusion, bearing the same title as the book, that at once reviews and
extends my overall argument before closing with a discussion of one last work by Wall,
After "Spring Snow" by Yukio Mishima.
As this summary suggests, philosophical texts by Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and Hegel
(also by Stanley Cavell and Robert Pippin) are vital to my project; this is because the
new arr photography has found itself compelled to do a certain amount of what I think
of as ontological work, and because the writings of those particular philosophers have
introduction 3
proved indispensable ro my efforts ro make clear exactly what this has involved. Other
writers who figure in this book in text and notes (apart from numerou s commentators
on my photographer -subjects) are Chevrier, Barthes, Brassa"i on Proust and Proust
himself, the anonymous author of a French eighteenth-century conte, Susan Sontag,
Clement Greenberg, Gertrude Stein in her essay "Pictures," Heinrich von Kleist, Robert
Musil, Brian O'Doherty, Walter Benn Michaels (whose writings on photography bear
closely on my arguments), and, perhaps most surprisingly, Yukio Mishima in several
passages in his great terralogy, The Sea of Fertility. However, my focus will be over
whelmingly on the photograph s I have chosen to discuss.
Two more points. First, in my introduction to Art and Objecthood: Essays and
Reviews, I insist that "between m)•self as historian of the French antirheatical tradition
and the critic who wrote 'Arr and Objecrhood ' there looms an unbridgeable gulf ....
11s eeJ no way of negotiating the difference between the priority given in [my early arr
criricismJ to judgment s both positive and negative and the principled refusal of all such
judgments in rhe pursuit of historical understanding Jin Absorption and Theatricality,
Courbet's Realism, and Manet's Modernism]."2 This seemed ro me a matter of some
importance, if only because I did nor want to be understood as endorsing Diderot's views
of individual artists (for example, deprecating Watteau). Well, as the reader of Why
Photography Matters as Art as Never Before is about to discover, the gulf in question
no longer looms as it previous!)' did; put slightly differently, the present book turns our
to be generically mixed - at once criticism and history, judgmental and non-judgm ental,
engaged and detached - in ways that would have been incomprehensible ro me only a
short rime ago.J
Second, a word about my epigraph . The citation from Heidegger, "Each answer
remains in force as an answer only as long as it is rooted in questioning," was previ
ously used by me as the epigraph ro rhe introductor y essay, "About my Arr Criticism,"
to the 1998 anthology of 111)' arr crirical writings, Art and Objecthood: Essays and
Reviews. When I placed it there, 1 meant to signal an awareness that the issues grap
pled with in my arr criticism of the 1960s were no longer burning topics in contempo-
1ary arr (the introduction dares from 1995-6 ), and that I ought nor rob e imagined as
standing behind each and every claim in my early writings as if nothing significant had
happened in the intervening years. By using it again here, however, I mean to signal
something almost exactly opposite: rhar the issues of rhearricaliry and objecrhood rhar
were crucial to my arr criticism in J 966-7 are once again, in Heidegger's tremendous
phrase, "roote d in questioning," nor least questioning conducted with great force and
brilliance by the photographers themselves. Indeed the questioning had begun well
before I wrote that introduc tory essay, bur I did nor know it then. Now I do.
4 why photography matters as art as never before
three beginni ngs 1
There are rhree beginnings to rhis book, each of which in irs own way prepares rhe
ground for the chapters thar follow.
The firsr rakes off from a consideration of rhe Japanese photograp her Hiroshi
Sugimoto's widely ad111ired black-and-whire photographs of movie rhearers in different
ciries in rhe Unired Srares, which he began 11a1king in rhe 11i1d-,97os, while he was srill
phorograph ing diora111asi n 111sueu11s1 of natura l history- his firsr marure body of work
(Figs. , and 2.). (Sugi111too, born in Japan in 1.948, came to rhe Unired Srares in 1970
to srudy arr. Since rhen he has rraveled widely bur lives mainly in New York. I shall
have something ro say abour his "Seascapes" larer in rhis book.) He went on making
rhe movie rhearer phorographs for another rwenty-five years: in the caralogue to his
2005-6 traveling retrospective exhibition rhey are dated 1975-2.001. In char catalogue,
too, Sugimoto provides rhe following brief introductory sraremenr ro rhose pictures :
I am a habirual self-interlocutor. One evening while raking photographs fof dioramas ]
ar rhe American Museu111o f Natural Hisrory, I had a near-hallucinatory vision. My
internal question-and-a nswer session leading up to rhis vision went something like
rhis: "Suppose you shoor a whole movie in a single fra111e?"T he answer: "You ger a
shining screen." Immediately I began experimenting in order to realize rhis vision.
One afternoon I walked inro a cheap cinema in rhe Easr Village with a large-formar
camera. As soon as rhe movie started, I fixed the shutter ar a wide-open aperture.
When rhe movie finished rwo hours later, I clicked rhe shurrer closed. Thar evening I
developed the film, and my vision exploded before my eyes.'
In orher words, the dazzling blankness, rhe sheer whireness, of che screens in rhe movie
rhearer photographs are rhe resulr of leaving rhe shurrer open chroughour an entire film;
by the same token, there was jusr enough cumulative reflected light from the screen ro
make possible rhe relatively dark bur also marvelously detailed registration of rhe rhearer
interiors themselves.
Now, I have no wish to challenge the veracity of Sugimoto's account of how he came
ro make rhe movie theater photographs. Bur ir should be noted thar he presents his doing
so as rhe ourcome of a solitary brilliant intuirion, as if rhe photographs sprang fully con
ceived our of his questioning mind and thus had nothing wharever to do wirh anyrhing
else raking place in photography at approximately the same moment. Maybe this really
is how they came to be made. Yer the facr remains rhar rhe second half of the 1970s
saw ar leasr rwo orher norable iniriarives in "art" photography rhar engaged head-on
with the quesrion of cinema, and I want to suggesr rhat unless rhose initiatives are taken
three beg,nnings 5
1 Hiroshi Sugimoto, U.A. Walker, New York, 1978. Gelatin silver print.
u9.4 x 149.2 cm, Negative 213
2 Hiroshi Sugimoto, Ohio Theater, Ohio, 1980. Gelatin silver print. 1 19.4 x
149.2 cm, Negative 205
into considerarion, one's sense of Sugimoro's achievement in rhe movie theater photo
graphs risks being curiously abstract, cut off from the contemporary history of which
it was a part. l refer to the early work of Cindy Sherman and Jeff Wall.
Sherman first. The works I have in mind are her famous Untitled Film Stills, modesr
sized black-and-w hite photographs which she made between r977 and 1980.2 They are,
of course, not actual film stills but photographs imitating the look of film stills, and in
all rhe images (a total of eighty-four) the protagonist is Sherman herself, or rather one
or another female "character" whom Sherman is playing or impersonating (in all the
photographs she is alone, no one else appears). There is by now a vast critical lirerarure
on Sherman's work, much of it in my opinion theoretically overblown,3 bur here are
some interesting remarks by Sherman herself:
I liked rhe Hitchcock look, Antonioni, Neorealist stuff. What I didn't want were pic
tures showing strong emotion. In a lor of movie photos rhc actors look cute, impish,
alluring, distraught, frighrened, rough, ere., bur what I was interesred in was when
they were almost expressionless. Which was rare to see; in film stills there's a lot of
overacting because they're trying ro sell rhe movie. The movie isn't necessarily funny
or happy, bur in those publiciry photos, if there's one character, she's smiling. Ir was
in European film stills that I'd find women who were more neutral, and maybe the
original films were harder to figure our as well. I found thar more mysterious. I looked
for it consciously; I didn't want to ham ir up, and I knew rhat if I acted too happy,
or too sad, or scared - if rhe emotional quotient was too high - the photograp h would
seem campy. 181
One way of glossing rhis might be to say that by her own account, despite rhe fact that
she was in effect "performing" for the camera - dressing up, making up, arranging rhe
scene, and finally playing a role - Sherman at the same time felt impelled to avoid
displays of emorion and by implication entire scenes that might strike rhe viewer as
theatrical in rhe pejorative sense of the rerm. (The word is mine, not hers. This is nor
to say rhar all the Untitled Film Stills are equally restrained. I need hardly add rhat the
issue of theatricality looms large both in my art critical essay of 1967, "Art and Objecr
hood," and in my historical studies of the evolution of painting in France between the
middle of rhe eighteenth century and the advent of Manet and his generation in the early
, 86os.4) Accordingly, in most of the Stills Sherman depicts characters who appear
absorbed in thought or feeling (Fig. 3); or who look "offscreen" in a manner that sug
gests that their attention has been drawn, fleetingly or otherwise, by something or
someone ro be found there (Fig. 4); or who gaze close up at their own image in a mirror
(Fig. 5); or who are viewed from the rear or the side, from an elevated or "depressed"
viewpoint, from a considerable distance, or under orher circumstances that rule out the
possibility of any implied communication between the personage in the photograph and
rhe viewer (Fig. 6). Throughour the series the basic movies convention (or diegeric law)
of never depicting the subject looking directly ar the camera is in force,' and in general
the cinematic character of the photographs could hardly be more emphatic. But there
is also a convergence between a number of the actional and structural motifs char one
three beginnings 7
3 Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still, #53, 1980. Gelatin silver print. 16.2 x 24 cm. Museum
of Modern Arr, New York. Grace M. Mayer Fund
4 Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still, #9, 1978. Gelatin silver print. 18.9 x 24
cm. Museum of Modern Art, New York. Purchase
/
5 Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still, #56, r980 . Gelatin silver print. r6.2 x 24 cm. Museum
of Modern Art, New York. Acquired through the generosity of Jo Carole and Ronald S. Lauder
in memory of Mrs John D. Rockefeller 111
6 Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still, #48, r979. Gelatin silver print. 16.2 x 24
cm. Museum of Modern Arr, New York. Acquired throug h the generosity of Jo
Carole and Ronald S. Lauder in memory of Eugene S. Schwartz
7 (right and facing /Jnge)
Jeff Wall, Mnuie Audience,
1 979. Seven transparencies
in three lightboxcs. Each
transparency 101.5 x 105 cm
finds in the Stills and motifs deployed by eighteenth- and nineteenrh-cenrury French
painters in the inrerest of what l have called antitheatricality (as Regis Durand recog
nizes apropos of the treatment of the subject's gaze in Sherman's Rear Scree11P rojec
tio1s1 of 1980).6 I shall have much more to say about this issue further on in this chapter
and in those that follow, but I wanr to stop shore of characterizing the Stills as antithe
atrical pure and simple for two reasons. First, it is not clear - at least not at this pre
liminary point in rhe larger argument of this book - what such a claim can mean in the
realm of photography or indeed that of cinema (a separate topic) and therefore, 11 for
tiori, in the realm of a conception of photography that openly presents itself as para
sitic if not on cinema itself then on a particular cinematic artifact, the film still. Second,
Sherman's Stills both individually and (even more explicitly) as a group present them
selves as having been deliberately staged by the photographer - and is not ''stagedness"
such as one finds in these images a marker of theatricality, nor its antithesis? The answer
to this question, which will emerge as I proceed, is fairly complex, but rhe poinr I want
to underscore is that Sherman's Stills raise rhe question in a particularly pressing form
{they are not simply theatrical, in ocher words), which is also to say that there is more
to them as works of art than brilliant visual deconstructions of fictions of feminity, which
is mostly how they have been understood.7
Jeff Wall, the other key figure I want to cite in this connection, made The Destroyed
Room, his first lightbox picture - a Cibachrome transparency illuminated from behind
by fluorescent bulbs, throughout almost all his career his preferred medium - in 1978.k
From the outset, his art has involved triangulating benvcen photography, painting, and
cinema, as he himself has repeatedly stated in essays and interviews. (A particularly
splendid example of such triangulation, Momi11g Cleani1g1, Mies van der Rohe Fou1-1
datio1,1 Barce/o1a1 f r999 J, will be the principal work discussed in Chapter Three.) In
fact, in Wall's recently published catalogue raisonne all his works are characterized by
him either as "documentary" or "cinematographic" photographs, the latter rerm imply
ing some measure of preparation of the motif - some measure of "staging," in other
10 why photography matters as all as never before