Fillip

Arni HaraldssonFriedʼs Turn

Michael Fried, Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008

In Michael Friedʼs latest book, Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before (2008), the chaptertitled “Barthesʼs Punctum” is engaging for its complex and intricate reading of sections of RolandBarthesʼs Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (1981). As such, it stands quite apart from theother nine chapters—devoted primarily to various internationally renowned contemporary artphotographers such as Jeff Wall, Thomas Demand, Thomas Struth, and others—which are alsoengaging, but in different ways. Prior to its publication, anticipation had begun to build up aroundFriedʼs new book, with large portions of the text appearing in publications such as Critical Inquiry andArtforum and as lectures in various places over the past few years. Not surprisingly, Friedʼs tendencytoward self-quotation has been pointed out, which prompted him to “preempt” queries regarding toonarrow a focus: …the chapters that follow constantly refer to my own earlier writings; I declare thisup front, to preempt the facile criticism that I am excessively preoccupied with my ownideas.“1”:#note1 Fried has also been criticized as a conservative provocateur—for failing to addressmedia spectacle and globalization and, perhaps most notably, for not engaging in issues of socialcritique but primarily in issues of ontological perspicacity. For a somewhat timely counter to WhyPhotography Matters—although it was not intended as such—one would do well to examine AriellaAzoulayʼs The Civil Contract of Photography, a book certainly not without its faults, also published in2008, that addresses the various instrumental applications of photography. Azoulay places inabeyance the constructed image and makes a significant contribution to the re-emergence ofdocumentary photography as a vital component of political culture. In this sense, photography doesmatter, but not, as with Fried, strictly as art or a means of serving a particular agenda; it may well bethat photography also matters more than ever because it is in some respects over—that is to say,over but only as weʼve known it since 1839. Friedʼs title conveys an immediacy, but its urgency fadesto leave us wondering how and why the echoes of eighteenth-century pictorial rhetoric should matterfor contemporary art photography as never before. Such lack or doubt, however, we neednʼtconstrue as a failure on Friedʼs part since, to employ an old adage, it is not only the destination butalso the journey that is of interest here.

Friedʼs hauteur aside, his so-called turn to photography, we learn, occurred in the mid 1990s, whenhe became interested in certain works of contemporary photography (Wall in particular) thatimpressed him as reviving and extending what Fried himself had earlier termed the “antitheatricaltradition” and whose lineage he had traced to the surfacing of absorptive motifs within the pictorialrhetoric of eighteenth-century French painting. (See his trilogy on eighteenth- and nineteenth-centuryFrench painting: Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot [1980],Courbetʼs Realism [1990], and Manetʼs Modernism: Or, the Face of Painting in the 1860s [1996]).

The beholder of such work, Fried argued, was made to believe that the figures depicted are socompletely engaged within the scene of the painting, or world within the picture, that they are totallyunaware of being beheld. To be clear, the antithesis of absorption for Fried is theatricality, or self-important posing and provocation, as when a work addresses the beholder and declares itself beforean anticipated audience; an absorbed work, on the other hand, is identified as self-contained andself-sufficient. Motifs of absorption in photography, however, unlike in painting, tend to appearstaged, and their seeming contrivance produces problems especially unique to the medium—problems that Barthes speculated on in some depth in Camera Lucida. But the difficulty of achievingredemptive absorption in photographic surface, Fried informs us, was overcome with the appearanceof the tableau in the late 1970s, in the work of Jean-Marc Bustamante and Thomas Ruff, amongothers, when, as Jean-Francois Chevrier has pointed out, photography began to be madespecifically for the wall.2 In this sense, we learn that art photography came to inherit the entireproblematic of beholding as Fried had earlier defined it.

Such an account, however inadequately outlined here in its brevity, does form a rather suspiciouslyneat fit, allowing Fried to not only further exercise his career-long animosity toward what heperceived as the shortcoming of Minimalism—namely, its embrace of theatricality, as explicated inhis controversial, career defining essay, “Art and Objecthood,” originally published in 1967 in_Artforum_—but more importantly, to conveniently rehearse and extend his particular reading of the“antitheatrical tradition” (as trilogy becomes quartet), arguing that serious and important art continuesto be made and experienced under a version of the “Diderotian regime or dispensation.” Throughout,Fried seems to suggest nothing less than the need for a re-aestheticization of photography, if not areconfigured periodization, with “antitheatricality,” “to-be-seenness,” and “beholding,” etc. astranscending the restrictions and limitations of Modernism. To be fair, one might infer that Friedimplies as much, but he does not directly say so. At times, however, one does detect the faint echoof a managerial voice, perhaps a collectivity of guiding voices in the background, navigating Friedwithin a discipline that is still relatively new to him, evidenced by the predictable absence of, forexample, Axel Hütte, Petra Wunderlich, or Craigie Horsfield. Although issues of inclusion andexclusion seem almost by default unavoidable, the lack of diversity among the photographers Frieddiscusses does prompt one to wonder how a theoretical reading of arguably the most significantimage regime of the past hundred years could be so utterly singular in its assessment. Thediscussion around Andreas Gursky is especially revealing in its suggestion of a slight wavering onFriedʼs behalf; hence his re-assessment in 2009 of Gurskyʼs new work as recently exhibited in Basel:“…they were simply, as it were, too large, too reconstructed, too tweaked, too black-white—may Isay too theatrical?—to be really compelling”.3

It may well be that photography really does matter for Fried, more than ever before, since it hasincreasingly come to be the place where a certain crisis of the picture inaugurated in the late 1960sand early 1970s has played out in an especially productive way. Despite Friedʼs statement that he isnot interested in developing “an ontology of photography,” recently indexicality—the notion that themedium contains the physical traces of the thing it represents—has come to assign photography thetask of overcoming its seeming belonging to the world of objects. This transformation that alsoconcerns the mediumʼs digitization is, in part, what has drawn Fried to a reconsideration of

photography, and this despite his curious relegation of digitization to parentheses. He identifiesBarthesʼs “little book” as something of a swan song for an artifact on the brink of fundamentalchange brought about by two material alterations taking place at that time: digitization and thegradual increase in the physical size of art photographs. That the latter alteration should takeprecedence over the advent of digitization, with its ensuing transformation of the ontology of thephotograph, seems curious at best. Perhaps one need take heed here, as more than anything elsethis speaks to the singularity of Friedʼs agenda.

Ostensibly, Friedʼs prime objective with “Barthesʼs Punctum” is to correct what he perceives to be apurely subjective response to the punctum on the part of the viewer, who, thus, fails to grasp whatultimately is at stake in Barthesʼs central distinction between studium and punctum. By furthersuggesting to what extent Barthes himself may have been unaware of “the ultimate implications ofhis own argument,”“4”:#note4 Fried prepares the ground for his particular re-reading of Barthesʼspunctum. He begins by drawing our attention to section 20 of Camera Lucida, specifically a singlepage of print that for Fried, “embodies a radical shift in perspective”.5 The first two sentences are themost pertinent here: “Certain details may ʻprickʼ me. If they do not, it is doubtless because thephotographer has put them there intentionally”.6 For Fried, this amounts to an “antitheatrical” claimon Barthesʼs part and thus conveniently allows him to identify Camera Lucida as being “everywheredriven by an unacknowledged anitheatricalism”,“7”:#note7 that therefore bears a close relationship tohis larger argument as outlined in the absorption trilogy/quartet. That Barthesʼs statement—that agiven detail that strikes him as a punctum could not do so had it been intended as such by thephotographer—is ultimately to be understood as “antitheatrical” should alert the reader to theprofound elasticity of Friedʼs terminology.

A truly “antitheatrical” photograph for Barthes, Fried informs us, “must somehow carry within it anontological guarantee that it was not intended to be so by the photographer….The punctum, I amsuggesting, functions as that guarantee”.8 Curiously, however, Barthes does claim in Camera Lucidathat the punctum may also be of the mind, or at the level of remembrance, rather than strictly “in” or“of” the image: “…the punctum (is) revealed only after the fact, when the photograph is no longer infront of me and I think back on it. I may know better a photograph I remember than a photograph Iam looking at, as if direct vision oriented its language wrongly, engaging it in an effort of descriptionwhich will always miss its point of effect, the punctum”.9 Indeed, the punctum is a most difficult thingto pin down, or, should one say, to prick. Fried recognizes the truly aporetic nature of the punctumwhen he points to certain affinities between the literalist work of the Minimalists and the punctum,whereby the Minimalists understood the relationship between the literalist work and the beholder as“emphatically not determined by the work itself”,“10”:#note10 suggesting that meaning in literalismwas essentially indeterminate. With regard to Barthes and his constant imperative in Camera Lucida“to evade, elide or otherwise get round the photographerʼs intentions,” an element of the punctum,Fried suggests, is operating at the level of the literalist work. This, however, he reminds us, is not toidentify Barthesʼs position as literalist tout court, since that would be to fail to recognize “the depthand pervasiveness of his ʻantitheatricalʼ commitments”.11 Although Fried is here back to proclaimingBarthes as partaking of the “antitheatrical” tradition, much to his credit, he generously acknowledgesthat Camera Lucida ultimately reveals the extent to which it is impossible to construct a radically

“anitheatrical” theory of photography.

On occasion throughout Why Photography Matters, Fried declares his intention “to bring the entirequestion of antitheatricality in contemporary art photography into the open as regards both the worksthemselves and, wherever relevant, the discourse around them”.12 Perhaps, but as regards Barthes,one cannot help but feel that Fried has, on the one hand, initiated one of the most insightfulrereadings of Camera Lucida while simultaneously having performed a most reductive rewriting ofthat text as an “antitheatrical” animus. To be sure, Barthesʼs “little book” “is” and “is not” aboutphotography since it is also a hybrid text, somewhere between essay and fiction, having allowedBarthes to exercise his notion of the “third text.” Barthes, not unlike certain artist-photographers Frieddiscusses in his book, uses photography to facilitate a meditation on mourning (the death of hismother)—one might say on how mourning becomes the image. Let it be understood that Friedhimself is not being faulted here for daring to tamper with some sacred text—not at all. Rather, hisrevision seems too much a rehabilitation of the “late” Barthes, too insistent on prescribing a futurecourse for photography that may well be antithetical to the spirit of Camera Lucida. In a similar vain,Friedʼs forging of “antitheatricality” with contemporary art photography ultimately fails to fully take intoaccount the possibility of artʼs total transformation, even in unforeseen ways, over time.

About this ArticleFriedʼs Turn was first published in Fillip 11 in Spring 2010.

Arni Haraldsson is Associate Professor of Photography at Emily Carr University of Art and Design.

Notes01. Michael Fried, Why Photography Matters As Art As Never Before (Yale University Press, NewHaven and London, 2008), 2.02. See Jean Francois-Chevrier, “The Adventures of the Picture Form in the History of Photography(1989),” trans. Michael Gilson, in The Last Picture Show: Artists Using Photography, 1960–82, exh.cat. (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2003), 116.03. “Why Photography Matters As Art As Never Before: Michael Fried in Conversation with JamesWelling,” Aperture 195 (Summer 2009), 84.04. Why Photography Matters, 95.05. Ibid., 98.06. Ibid.07. Ibid., 3.08. Ibid., 102.09. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York:Hill and Wang, 1981), 53.10. “Barthesʼs Punctum” is a slightly revised version of the original published under the same title inCritical Inquiry 31 (Spring 2005), 539–74. This and the following brief quotation appear on page 573of that initial publication.11. Why Photography Matters, 345.

12. Ibid., 344.

The views expressed in Fillip are not necessarily those of the editorial board or the ProjectilePublishing Society.

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