Michael Fried on Why Photography Matters

Once Michael Fried starts talking about photography his enthusiasm is infectious: ‘What I was seeing was people standing in front a work by Jeff Wall for twenty or twenty five minutes – and talking about it, discussing it, pointing out things. And I thought, “Man, this is great; this is just good in itself”. I’d say to my painter friends – even the ones who are still abstract painters – “Photography is on your side – just wait.” Because photography is making people look closely again, and in itself that is simply marvellous.’

Jeff Wall, The Destroyed Room, 1978. Transparency in lightbox

We are discussing Fried’s latest book Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before, a study of the work of selected contemporary photographers including Wall, Thomas Demand, Andreas Gursky, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Candida Hofer and Luc Delahaye, amongst others. As might be expected from one of art’s premier critics and historians, his work probes far deeper than many comparable surveys “The problem is,” he explains, “that almost always writers don’t go far enough when discussing contemporary photography. So, if we’re talking about Thomas Demand for example, you’ll find essay after essay, article after article, that will describe exactly what Demand does: he gets an image from the media, he re-makes it in cardboard and he then photographs it. But what you never really get is an account of why the writer thinks he did that – of the motivation behind such a labour-intensive way of making a photograph.”

‘And you can generalise that across the board: everyone understands what the Bechers did for all those decades,’ he continues without pausing. ‘There are very useful accounts of it: they would drive to these different places; they would wait for the sky to be a certain kind of grey light; they would build a specific kind of scaffolding, because they would always photograph from a certain height. They wanted this; they wanted that. They then put together these typologies in various ways…and, that’s it. But the question, for me is ‘OK, they did that…and why is that important? Or “What is the further, deep significance of that?” To put it really simply: What is their project? What’s Demand’s project? What’s Struth’s project in the family pictures? What are the projects of Gursky, Wall, and so on? My book is relentless in trying to give an account of these different projects, as I see it. I may be wrong in every single case – I have no guarantee that I’m right. But at least I’ve tried, again and again, to develop interpretive critical accounts of what I take these people to be trying to do.”

The photographers are household names; and their work well-known. Yet an air of improbability – unreality even – permeates our conversation. After all, who would have predicted that Fried – the trenchant and partisan advocate in the 1960’s of high modernist abstraction – would ever throw in his lot with photography? Who, for that matter, would have foretold that Fried – after decades as a historian of eighteenth and nineteenth century art – would return with a vengeance to criticism and the contemporary scene? Reflecting on his volte-face Fried identifies a pivotal moment five years ago when he abruptly shelved a near-complete study of Caravaggio to focus his attention instead on new art photography. Enthusing about the decision, he comments, “It was exciting and it felt very urgent because it was contemporary. The earliest part of my career was as a contemporary critic and it’s been very thrilling to feel that I’m back in the arena. And I am.”

That said, at one level Fried has long enjoyed photography. He explains, ‘I bought my first photograph – a Berenice Abbott print – in my early 30’s. So I was aware of photography; I liked looking at photographs. At some point in the early 80’s there was a big Timothy O’Sullivan exhibition in Washington DC, and I completely loved it. If I could figure out how to write about O’Sullivan I would do it tomorrow, or I would have done it then. But I just didn’t see how to get at it. I would go see photography exhibitions, but I knew terribly little about it and I was not in any way focused on the subject – I didn’t have anything to say about it.’

James Welling, exhibition catalogue (detail), Wexner Center for the Arts, 2000

‘My serious engagement with photography really began in the 1990’s through coming to know the work of, and becoming friends with, first James Welling and second Jeff Wall. I started to play catch-up around 1994; at that moment, anybody who was interested in photography knew a million times more than I. Then I began sensing that something was happening that I could see was very interesting. And what happens for me is that when I start a new project, everything I write, everything I do, comes out of some moment of simultaneous visual engagement and something that feels like an insight – a feeling of “Hey, look at that. Could this be the way it goes?” Once that started with photography, then I started paying attention.’

Given his earlier interests, Fried’s Damascene conversion appears -if not baffling – certainly contradictory. He rose to eminence in the sixties as an opinionated and controversial theorist of Modernist art, for example, second only – in status and influence – to his former mentor Clement Greenberg. In the formalist criticism of essays such as “Shape and Form” and “Art and Objecthood” (both published in Artforum, 1966-7 ) Fried argued for the primacy of the transcendent and intuitive experience of a work’s value, itself adjudicated by reference to canonical exemplars in that medium. (It hardly needs saying that the circumstances were not conducive to the appreciation of a medium as utilitarian and promiscuous as photography). In “Art and Objecthood” in particular, he famously attacked the objects and suppositions of minimalism, or literalism, denouncing its concerns and mode of address as theatrical and thereby inimical to the autonomy of the proper formalist and aesthetic concerns of advanced art. The theatricality of a work’s implied relationship to its viewer constituted, for Fried, a corruption of modernist sensibilities and a fraudulent passing-off of “ingratiating and mediocre” work as “difficult and advanced.” The essay caused a furore and polarised opinion, while definitively summarising what, for some, was felt to be at stake.

Of course neither minimalism nor history was on his side: the hour of high modernism marked an eclipse, not a new dawn. With time, his spirited attack on the minimalists and all they stood for began to more closely resemble the last-ditch defence of a beleaguered abstractionist modernism. In the decades that followed Fried eschewed criticism, but not his hostility to theatricality – a lineage of which he charted in a trilogy of books examining the course of French art from the middle of the eighteenth century to the second half of the nineteenth: Absorption and Theatricality; Courbet’s Realism; and Manet’s Modernism

Stephen Shore, Holden Street, North Adams, Massachusetts, July 13, 1974

And it was while he was immersed in French art history that Fried believes the dynamics of contemporary picture-making changed again – this time through the medium of photography. The catalyst was its admission to the space of the gallery, and the photographer’s incorporation of that destination into their work. ‘I was oblivious to all this’, he recalls ‘but then I think something started to transpire around 1980 when the pictures get larger and they get made for the wall. Once that happens they naturally engage with issues which have to do with their relation to the viewer; and a whole set of issues return in force – to my mind – in new and completely unexpected ways.’

Cover illustration: Jeff Wall, A View from an Apartment (detail), 2004-5

‘The argument of the book is that starting then – or even in a sense starting with the Bechers – the new art photography found itself compelled to engage again with the set of issues that belonged to “Art & Objecthood” and to then what I came subsequently to see was the entire problematic of painting in France between the middle of the eighteenth century and the generation of Manet, And it was thrilling, because I had a sense not just of how this all held together, but that it held together – if I am right, and who knows if I am right? – by virtue of a kind of forced engagement with issues that I laid out, first in the criticism of 1966-67 and then in the historical trilogy that followed. So it’s a big, ambitious, quite exciting project; and I’m right, or I’m not right. But the attempt of the book is to make that case.’

The examples Fried collates testify to what he approvingly refers to as photography’s “tough, difficult and uninviting” qualities. So Thomas Ruff’s portraits are singled out for their blank frontality, their impenetrability and their confrontational scale. As are Jean-Marc Bustamante’s arid and unwelcoming landscapes for their utter lack of event or interest. Jeff Wall’s conspicuous lightbox apparatuses and artfully constructed ‘near documentary’ scenes deliberately undermine the depiction of everyday life. And Andreas Gursky’s elevated perspectives, extreme distances and intrusive formal elements negate the possibility of imaginative entry into his landscapes. All refute spectatordom and voyeurism, and offer instead the challenge of patient, sustained and rewarding looking. As confirmation, Fried cites evidence from gallery visits: ‘Even when I first started being aware of this I would see people – young people – were looking and talking. And that’s something that you don’t do with conceptual art, let’s say…or hasn’t been done with a lot of other kinds of art. You don’t actually have to look very hard at a Joseph Beuys exhibition. You don’t look hard at Young British Artists. You don’t look at a Damien Hirst; you go in and have whatever little trivial frisson that junk generates.’

Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Mario, 1981

Fried’s frames of reference are artistic, not photographic. And bearing in mind the long shadow cast over his work by modernism’s apparent demise, I wonder whether Why Photography Matters is not in some respects a work of mourning? Whilst he concedes that “one impulse of the book feels like a return to all sorts of values associated with high modernism”, he is far too upbeat to be described as mournful. “There is so much that photography can do that painting can’t exactly do. And I don’t feel the emotional tenor of the book has any grief in it – I enjoyed writing it too much. Frankly, I’m thrilled that this has all happened. My own sense of the emotional tonality of that book is something like glee.’ Glee and, by the sound of it, relief that what he terms the “interregnum” of minimalism (and what followed) might be over. The emotions are evident as he describes the contrast between the moment of “Art and Objecthood”, and the decade that followed.

‘One of the ways in which history has been re-written is the idea that by 1964 or 1965 high modernism was over and minimalism was triumphant. And that’s just not the way it was, or felt, to anyone on the scene at the time. ‘66-‘67 was a very, very thrilling year for high modernism – it’s the year of Stella’s Eccentric Polygons, and beautiful paintings by Noland and Olitski, and great sculpture by Caro. So in my part of the world there was anything but a sense of rout. It felt very triumphalist. “Art and Objecthood” to my mind was being written from a position of artistic and theoretical strength – it never occurred to me as I was writing that piece that anyone in the fullness of time could prefer a completely conventional and, to my mind to this day, conceptually and artistically soft piece like Tony Smith’s Die to Morris Louis’ Unfurled paintings. It just was not conceivable to me and,’ he laughs, ‘it’s still not conceivable to me!’

‘But then, by the time we enter the ‘70’s there’s no question what’s happening…and to me it looks like, it feels like, a sort of cultural disaster. It didn’t occur to me…I didn’t know how things would ever change. And I do think things have, as it were, changed. I lost faith in the dialectic; and I shouldn’t have. But the dialectic has made another massive turn – it started to do it around 1980, but I didn’t know it.’

‘And it happened through photography. Who could have imagined it?’

This interivew first published in Art World magazine

Why Phototgraphy Matters as Art as Never Before

by Michael Fried

Yale Univeristy Press, £30