Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before
By Michael Fried (Yale University Press, 409 pp., $55)
I.
Michael Fried,who shot to intellectual stardom in 1967 with an essay in Artforum called "Art and Objecthood," is an intimidating writer. He looks very closely. He has passionate feelings about what he sees. And he shapes his impressions into a theory that fits snugly with all the other theories he has ever had. Whatever his chosen subject--Diderot, Courbet, Manet, Kenneth Noland--he comes up with an interpretation that is as smoothly and tightly constructed as a stainless-steel box. His writing amounts to a set of matching stainless-steel boxes. He puts potential critics on notice that the best they can hope to do is leave a few fingerprints or scratches on these perfectly polished surfaces. And so many people back away. Fried wants us to feel that we could as easily demolish the Great Pyramid of Giza with a pick-axe as successfully question his interpretations of his chosen themes--which now include the art of the camera, in his new book, Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before. This is Fried's first extended foray into photography, and although it was a subject of discussion in academic circles even before it appeared, it has not received the more general attention that it deserves. Fried brings audacious arguments to old controversies about the relationship between art and photography. I find the arguments troubling, even wrongheaded, but only a man with a bold, wide-ranging, and fearless mind could have dreamed such stuff up.
In order to come to terms with this book, we need to back up and see it as but one contribution--a striking one, to be sure--to a much wider discussion about the nature of photography. We tend to forget that photography is very young. While the 170 years that separate us from the medium's invention are an eternity in the history of technology, in the history of culture this is a relatively brief period of time. Photography's newness, and its ability, at least in technical terms, constantly to re-invent itself, is one key to its fascination: digitalization, which makes photographic truth seem more porous and changeable than ever before, is its most recent technical re-invention, and Fried discusses it. Then there are the numberless areas in life in which photography plays a role, ranging from family albums to evidence presented at criminal trials to the walls of art galleries and museums. In the years since the medium's inception, photography has been said to be classical, spiritual, mystical, straightforward, primitive, experimental, surreal, empirical, austere, reticent, impersonal, romantic, informal, reliable, unreliable, and downright misleading--and that is only the beginning.
Fried wants to set contemporary photography squarely within the high art traditions. While he is by no means the first writer to make a connection between photography and abstract painting, his theoretical assumptions will strike many as unexpected if not fairly incredible. His book, full of daring conceptual pyrotechnics, suggests an impatience with photography's wonderfully messy history--a desire to define the nature of photography once and for all, or at least the nature of the recent photographs that interest him. Perhaps this rage for order is inevitable, given all the attention that photography has been receiving in the marketplace, in the museums, and in the seminar rooms. There has been a growing sense that values need to be assigned and lineages need to be established. Photography, however, has a way of refusing to settle down. In Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before, Fried is trying to contain all photography's unruly powers; but it is not easy--it is not possible--to lock photography in a conceptual stainless-steel box. Willfulness, which has always driven the modern adventure in the arts, meets its match in photography, a medium with a will of its own. There will never be a Mondrian of photography, because photography is inherently impure.
The strange thing about Michael Fried is that he ought to recognize the extent to which photography is utterly unlike painting, considering that he emerged in the late 1960s as an avatar of painterly purity with his strenuous defenses of Kenneth Noland, Morris Louis, and Jules Olitski. Unfortunately, the man's pride in his own theoretical prowess may prevent him from seeing that other people have been here before. He appears oblivious to the fate of earlier efforts to develop a taxonomy of photography that would match the modern taxonomy of painting, which were encouraged by John Szarkowski, the legendary curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art from 1962 to 1991. The fascination of Szarkowski, who was himself a photographer and is sometimes now dismissed as a stiff-backed aesthete, was that for all his desire to set photography securely in an ivory tower adjacent to the one where Matisse and Mondrian dwell, he loved photography too much to overlook its incendiary impurity. Given how little is known about Atget, the early twentieth-century Parisian photographer whom Szarkowski worshipped, Szarkowski's encyclopedic studies of Atget's work had a way of almost inevitably shifting attention from the enigmatic photographer to the photographs themselves, and could thereby lead straight to postmodernism's obsession with the death, or at least the disappearance, of the author. The power of black and white photography to re-order reality is treasured by any antediluvian modernists who still happen to be kicking, but the unruliness of the world that photography reveals inspires postmodernists and post-postmodernists of every imaginable stripe.
Photography is not a medium that works in a single way or can be understood from one perspective. There are curators and critics who know this. Jeff Rosenheim's Walker Evans and the Picture Postcard (Steidl), the catalogue of a show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, wreaks havoc with conventional ideas about the relationship between high and low, exploring the close similarities between Evans's austerely elegant street scenes and picture postcards, a sort of commercial folk art, which this revered modernist photographer collected. Richard Benson's The Printed Picture, the catalogue of a show at the Museum of Modern Art, plunges deep into the shifting character of photographic technologies, ranging from daguerreotypes and early paper prints to innumerable different photomechanical processes and digital prints of all kinds. What Benson presents is a dazzling demonstration of photography's mongrel nature. Photography is the most permissive medium. It is certainly more accommodating than painting when it comes to finding a place for humor, kitsch, and all manner of eccentricity. This is why, as Susan Sontag pointed out a generation ago in On Photography, "it is the one art that has managed to carry out the grandiose, century-old threats of a Surrealist takeover of the modern sensibility, while most of the pedigreed candidates have dropped out of the race.”
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