C R I Q 1 8 6 8 Journal Name Manuscript No. B Dispatch: 30.4.09 Author Received: Journal: CRIQ No. of pages: 8 CE: Latha PE: Thanuja/Mini 1 2 Reviews 3 4 5 NOAM LESHEM AND LAUREN A. WRIGHT 6 7 8 Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before 9 by Michael Fried 10 Yale University Press, 2008, 409 pp., ISBN 978-0-300-13684-5 11 12 13 The Civil Contract of Photography 14 by Ariella Azoulay 15 Zone Books, 2008, 585 pp., ISBN 978-1-890-95188-7 16 17 18 What does it mean to look at a photograph? What is our role as 19 spectators and how are we to perform it? Two major recent publications 20 take up these questions. The two books’ approaches to these questions, 21 however, seem to diverge so widely as to be hardly comparable. The 22 subject of Michael Fried’s eagerly awaited new book is spectatorial 23 relations in recent art photography, which he articulates in terms of 24 distance, whereas Ariella Azoulay’s book (which was originally 25 published in Hebrew in 2006) questions this kind of aesthetic distance 26 by arguing for the ethical responsibility of viewers toward photographic 27 images of violence and suffering. Nevertheless, taken together, these (BWUK CRIQ 1868.PDF 30-Apr-09 21:0 87505 Bytes 8 PAGES n operator=M.Chackalayil) 28 two categorically different projects sketch out the parameters that have 29 defined recent critical work on the subject of photography’s spectators. 30 Fried addresses a shift in photographic practice since the 1970s from 31 establishing a one-to-one relationship with the viewer, either in small- 32 scale framed prints or between the covers of books, to a much more 33 public and explicitly ‘artistic’ form. Contemporary artists exemplary of 34 this shift include Jeff Wall (he gets the most attention, two whole 35 chapters), Thomas Struth, Thomas Ruff, Andreas Gursky, Rineke 36 Dijkstra, Thomas Demand, and Candida Ho¨fer, among others. All these 37 artists make use of what the French critic Jean-Franc¸ois Chevrier has 38 called the ‘tableau form’: printed at large scale, their photographs are 39 ‘designed and produced for the wall’.1 For Fried, this turn from realist 40 intimacy to grandiloquent artifice is significant. ‘The moment this 41 [shift] took place,’ Fried contends, ‘issues concerning the relationship 42 between the photograph and the viewer standing before it became 43 crucial for photography as they had never previously been.’ CRIQ 1868  Reviews: ‘The spectator is called to take part’ 111 1 Fried’s aim in the book is to describe this viewing relationship in the 2 terms he had first articulated in his seminal but ‘‘infamous’’ (Fried’s 3 own word) essay of 1967, ‘Art and Objecthood’.2 There he established 4 an opposition between Minimalist sculpture’s ‘bad’ theatricality, which 5 addressed itself directly to its viewer, and the ‘good’ antitheatricality of 6 modernist sculptors like Anthony Caro, whose work he understood as 7 self-contained, in no way constructed by the viewer’s experience of it. 8 Fried later developed this opposition in an art-historical rather than 9 critical mode, with regard to eighteenth- and nineteenth century French 10 painting up to Manet, in three books. The title of the first of these 11 books, Absorption and Theatricality, is indicative of the two opposed 12 tendencies that Fried identified in painting of this time (the other two 13 books are Courbet’s Realism and Manet’s Modernism). He argues that the 14 best paintings display a mode of ‘absorption’: figures are depicted as 15 engrossed in their own activities, so denying ‘the presence before them 16 of the beholder’ and establishing ‘the ontological fiction that the 17 beholder does not exist’ (p. 40). The effect, in Fried’s view, is to 18 encourage the viewer to examine the painting’s details, rather than to 19 feel addressed by it directly in a ‘theatrical’ mode. In Manet’s paintings, 20 however, the absorptive mode gives way to what Fried calls a ‘radical 21 ‘‘facingness’’’ or ‘surface orientation’ (pp. 40, 151). The figures within 22 the picture confront the beholder directly, while revealing little; rather 23 than creating an imaginative dialogue with the viewer, the figures’ 24 paintedness becomes apparent. Manet’s Olympia (1843) is depicted 25 (shockingly, for the time) fully naked as a contemporary courtesan, yet 26 her expression is blank and her body is rendered flatly, expressly 27 painted rather than ‘real’. The effect is to further distance the viewer. (BWUK CRIQ 1868.PDF 30-Apr-09 21:0 87505 Bytes 8 PAGES n operator=M.Chackalayil) 28 Manet’s is a seemingly paradoxical mode of address; the paintings 29 simultaneously confront the viewer, only in order to withdraw. In Why 30 Photography Matters, Fried suggests that this paradox is key to 31 understanding the work of recent artist-photographers. Their photo- 32 graphs ‘aspire to . . . the rhetorical, or beholder-addressing significance 33 of paintings while at the same time declaring their artifactual identity 34 as photographs’ (p. 37). As in the best French paintings before Manet, 35 Fried argues that these contemporary artists often depict their subjects 36 in an ‘absorptive’ mode, engaged in some activity which causes them 37 not to address the camera. For example, the man depicted in Jeff Wall’s 38 After ‘Invisible Man’ by Ralph Ellison, the Prologue (1999–2001), sits facing 39 away from the viewer. Yet while the figure looks away, the image 40 acknowledges its ‘to-be-seenness’ by means of the profusion of detail in 41 his carefully constructed surroundings (Wall is well known for being a 42 digital compositor – scenes are not only staged but also worked over 43 and added to with computer software). The complexity of the image CRIQ 1868  112 Critical Quarterly, vol. 51, no. 2 1 does not make its meaning more apparent to the viewer; on the 2 contrary, it ‘on the one hand reduces to a minimum any tendency on 3 the part of the viewer to ‘‘identify’’ with the protagonist and on the 4 other actively promotes . . . imaginative engagement and philosophical 5 reflection’ (p. 50). 6 Wall is not alone in his deployment of strategies which, in this 7 paradoxical way, stage a to-be-seenness while at the same time 8 ‘restoring the distance necessary for [a] confrontational experience’.3 9 Fried notes that Andreas Gursky achieves much the same effect in his 10 large and colourful images, using impossibly precise detail, but also by 11 employing improbable vantage points and other distancing devices. In 12 Swimming Pool, Ratingen (1987), one of his most important photographs 13 from the late eighties, Gursky depicts a large public swimming pool 14 with bright blue water and dark green grass and forest beyond. Many 15 of the tiny figures in and around the pool are depicted with such 16 clarity, despite the distance of the camera’s elevated vantage, that 17 minute personal dramas are detectable among them.4 Fried acknowl- 18 edges that the image could function as a ‘sociological document’ (p. 19 160) of young German men and women at a certain place and time (and 20 it has been read as such by other critics), but he favours a reading of the 21 image in terms of the viewer’s ‘feeling of remaining wholly outside the 22 proceedings the picture depicts’ (pp. 160–61). Similarly, for Fried, 23 Thomas Struth’s photographs of gallery-goers in museums depict, even 24 dramatise, self-reflexively, the non-communicating ‘worlds’ of art- 25 works and their viewers, through signs of disjunction between them. 26 Likewise, Thomas Ruff’s portraits of his Du¨sseldorf art school 27 colleagues retain their passport photo impersonality, despite their (BWUK CRIQ 1868.PDF 30-Apr-09 21:0 87505 Bytes 8 PAGES n operator=M.Chackalayil) 28 large scale, and Candida Ho¨fer’s sumptuous interiors avoid inviting 29 the viewer in through their rich engagement with the details of the 30 spaces. 31 Fried’s arguments with regard to these artists are generally 32 convincing on his own quite expansive and expandable terms, even 33 if they are by no means the only way these works could be read. 34 However, Fried’s enthusiasm for re-establishing the relevance of his 35 critical frame to contemporary work means that he does not address 36 the historical image-making conditions under which the photographs 37 were made, which differ significantly from those surrounding French 38 painting or even minimalist sculpture – that is, an environment where 39 photographic images, especially of violence, proliferate, and we 40 viewers must determine how to respond. Fried’s position is predicated 41 on that response being primarily aesthetic in keeping with his broadly 42 modernist project. Here we begin to see the potential problems of 43 Fried’s well-trodden argument as it is applied to photography, CRIQ 1868  Reviews: ‘The spectator is called to take part’ 113 1 especially in reference to Azoulay’s position. We might suspect that an 2 ethic of separation between ‘art’ and ‘non-art’ photographs is a subtext 3 to Fried’s argument, where the former should not dare address itself to 4 such difficult subjects for fear of instrumentalising them in the name of 5 aesthetics. Such an explicit or implicit image-politics is entirely absent 6 from the book, however, and his previous writings disavow such a 7 position.5 This is not necessarily a problem for the more explicitly 8 aesthetic work he discusses, like those referred to above, but when the 9 content of the images lends itself to a more political reading, the 10 slipperiness of Fried’s position begins to show. For example, Fried says 11 that large-scale photographs by former photojournalist Luc Delahaye 12 taken during conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq and the Gaza Strip are more 13 concerned with ‘an artistic . . . ideal of allowing the picture in all its 14 density of both reference and of colour to come into being of its own 15 accord’ (p. 184). Yet as Fried himself notes, Delahaye frames his images 16 so that they appear as though we could walk straight in. For Fried, this 17 falls on the side of disinterestedness and transparency over the 18 reportorial precision of photojournalism. This might be true, as the 19 images certainly do not function in a photojournalistic mode if only 20 because of their ‘tableau’ scale. But we might ask why we as viewers 21 are positioned by the images ‘in’ these scenes with their signs of far-off 22 violence – plumes of smoke, a destroyed refugee camp. Surely if we are 23 ‘there’, we have some relationship to, perhaps even some implied 24 responsibility for, those markers of damage. 25 Similarly Fried reads Rineke Dijkstra’s portraits of teenagers on 26 beaches as another example of ‘to-be-seenness’ without theatricality. 27 These are images that, according to him, play on the gap between the (BWUK CRIQ 1868.PDF 30-Apr-09 21:0 87505 Bytes 8 PAGES n operator=M.Chackalayil) 28 subjects’ awareness and unconsciousness. They disclose what Diane 29 Arbus called ‘the gap between intention and effect’ in photography6 – 30 certain photographic portraits make visible the ways in which subjects 31 want to present themselves to the camera, but also the ways in which 32 this intended self-fashioning falls short and is undone by unintended 33 effects that creep into the frame. Susan Sontag, among others, criticised 34 Arbus’s exploitation of that gap, which makes her subjects appear 35 ridiculous, as ‘freaks’. Fried suggests that Dijkstra’s work ‘has nothing 36 of the ethical difficulties raised by Arbus’s primarily because her 37 subjects are nicer to look at (p. 210). However, such a project is never 38 insulated from ethical issues, as the subject is always giving over some 39 control of their image to the viewer. This is even more apparent in 40 Dijkstra’s other photographs, mentioned briefly in the book, of people 41 having just undergone a major life experience – an Israeli soldier after 42 shooting a gun for the first time, and a nude mother holding her baby 43 just after giving birth. The former radiates with excessive machismo, CRIQ 1868  114 Critical Quarterly, vol. 51, no. 2 1 while the latter appears terribly vulnerable, a stream of blood just 2 visible as it runs down her leg. We as viewers are certainly called upon 3 to judge both the ethics of the photographic situation, and that of our 4 relationship to the people pictured. But Fried expressly avoids telling 5 us how to respond to such a situation. Photography ‘matters as art’, for 6 Fried, precisely because as art it need not, indeed must not, require us 7 to respond, because we are not directly addressed. Such a position 8 might be convincing where the ethical stakes of the images are lower. 9 But in reference to Delahaye and Dijkstra’s work, there is a distinct risk 10 of draining the images of their political potential and so actually 11 undermining the position of the people and places depicted. 12 Though she addresses a very different image corpus, one that is in 13 sharp contrast to Fried’s, Ariella Azoulay wishes to examine just these 14 dynamics of the viewer’s responsibility to what they see. The Civil 15 Contract of Photography emerged out of the author’s longstanding 16 concern with the images coming out of the Palestinian occupied 17 territories and the form of engagement they were calling for. She posits 18 the question simply: ‘Why are they looking at me?’ (p. 18). She 19 contends that artistic discourse provides little help in adequately 20 accounting for the role and responsibility of the spectator. Postmodern 21 theories of photography like Sontag’s proved almost as limited, 22 proclaiming that viewers have become desensitised to the glut of 23 images of war, destruction and loss. At most, we are asked to regard 24 the pain of others, show sympathy to their suffering. 25 The Palestinian women and men who feature in the photographs 26 Azoulay discusses are not looking for polite compassion. They are 27 often gazing straight into a camera held by a photographer, and beyond (BWUK CRIQ 1868.PDF 30-Apr-09 21:0 87505 Bytes 8 PAGES n operator=M.Chackalayil) 28 it, to potential viewers. The photographs coming from the occupied 29 territories are of people injured by a state that does not consider them 30 as citizens, shirking responsibility for their fate and the damage they 31 suffer. Yet at the same time, in their photographs, they appear as 32 plaintiffs, addressers of claims that assume that in the realm of the 33 photograph – in the encounter between photographed subject, 34 photographer, camera and spectator – they are legitimate, rightful 35 participants. It is from this scene that Azoulay begins to illustrate the 36 dynamic and reciprocal relations that constitute the photograph as a 37 civil space, organised by an unwritten yet clearly identifiable contract 38 between its participants. 39 Acknowledging the civil space opened by photography also brings 40 about the recognition that its addressee, the spectator, can no longer 41 occupy a position of a passive beholder, for, as such, one is only asked 42 to observe and contemplate a stationary object that is readily accessible 43 to immediate and exhaustive viewing. The civil contract formed CRIQ 1868  Reviews: ‘The spectator is called to take part’ 115 1 through and around the photograph does not rule out such a position, 2 but this, Azoulay solemnly reminds us, will have a direct impact on the 3 ability of the image to operate as an instrument through which claims 4 and arguments are transmitted into the civil realm. It is at this point 5 that spectatorship emerges as part of the ethical dimension of civic 6 responsibility: without a willing labour of spectatorship, the photo- 7 graph is left as a flawed statement, an impaired attempt to convey a 8 sense of urgency. Moreover, this urgency is a directly political one – it is 9 framed not as an appeal for passive empathy but as a call to action. 10 In the face of photographs of destruction and human suffering, 11 Azoulay insists, the spectators are asked to take part. They are required 12 ‘to move from the addressee’s position to the addresser’s position [and] 13 to take responsibility for the sense of such photographs by addressing 14 them even further’.7 Through detailed analysis, Azoulay illustrates the 15 empowering force of such ‘skilled observation’ (p. 168). In one such 16 example, of a Palestinian merchant from Hebron looking directly into 17 the camera, we first encounter the claim that is staged through the 18 photographic event. The man presents the broken padlock of his store, 19 which was forced opened by Israeli soldiers sent to break a trade strike. 20 Azoulay calls on spectators to place themselves in a position that 21 responds to the merchant’s claim, that recognises ‘that what they are 22 witnessing is intolerable’ (p. 18). 23 The meticulous attention Azoulay gives to these photographs is 24 inspiring. She discusses, for instance, a photograph of two Palestinian 25 women who were forced to go into labour while at Israeli checkpoints, 26 which resulted, in both cases, in the death of the babies. Yet in the 27 photo, one of the women looks calmly at the camera, her face serene, (BWUK CRIQ 1868.PDF 30-Apr-09 21:0 87505 Bytes 8 PAGES n operator=M.Chackalayil) 28 even joyous (p. 381). To decipher the woman’s composure, Azoulay 29 meets with the Israeli photographer, examines the entire series taken 30 that day, but admits that it remains inscrutable. But this indecipher- 31 ability also ‘makes present the open abyss between occupiers and 32 occupied [. . .] as well as the uselessness of any empathy or sorrow after 33 the fact, which will never amount to more than self righteous gestures’ 34 (p. 380). 35 This sensitive mode of spectatorship seems a daunting one to parlay 36 into an active contract. Azoulay states that her concern is specifically 37 with photographs of Palestinians and women, but it is unclear whether 38 this spectatorial mode of responsibility is also required beyond this 39 image corpus. Furthermore, while it might be true that ‘No special 40 talent is needed in order to listen to an injury claim’ (p. 143), other skills 41 and knowledge may well be required in order to identify and decode 42 the sense of emergency implicit in many of these photographs. 43 Azoulay’s emphasis on the process of becoming spectator, the need CRIQ 1868  116 Critical Quarterly, vol. 51, no. 2 1 to engage attentively with an ever growing mass of images containing 2 violent scenes of injury and destruction, does not address the limits of 3 one’s capacity to sustain this arduous process over time. Despite her 4 objection to the assertion that spectators have been ‘fatigued’ and have 5 ‘stopped looking’ (p. 11) she does not directly respond to the risk of 6 overexposure. 7 Azoulay’s book is a timely and important contribution that 8 resuscitates a sober sense of responsibility. Azoulay sensitively engages 9 with the photographs she discusses, many of which depict explicit 10 violence, and avoids any pathos in her conclusions. For Fried’s part, his 11 book gives thorough analysis of important developments in photo- 12 graphic practice, and his persistence in pursuit of his argument across 13 such a diversity of work is admirable, as is his call for others to ‘offer 14 superior interpretations of their own’ (p. 2). Surely these two scholars 15 understand the function of photography, and the spectator before it, 16 very differently. Indeed, they each demonstrate the problem of taking 17 the other’s argument to its logical extreme. Fried makes an important 18 effort to stake out a distinct space for viewing photographs as objects of 19 aesthetic and philosophical interest, but Azoulay demonstrates that in 20 some cases to do so might risk missing the photographic image’s 21 ethical demand for recognition and action. 22 23 24 25 Notes 26 1 Jean-Franc¸ois Chevrier, ‘The Adventures of the Picture Form in the History 27 (BWUK CRIQ 1868.PDF 30-Apr-09 21:0 87505 Bytes 8 PAGES n operator=M.Chackalayil) of Photography’ (1989), trans. Michael Gilson, in The Last Picture Show: 28 Artists Using Photography, 1960–1982, ed. Douglas Fogle (Minneapolis: 29 Walker Art Center, 2003), 116; Michael Fried, Why Photography Matters as 30 Art as Never Before, 143. All subsequent references to Fried’s book will 31 appear in parentheses in the text. 32 2 See Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood (Chicago: University of Chicago 33 Press, 1998). 34 3 Chevrier, ‘Adventures of the Picture Form’, 116; quoted in Fried, Why 35 Photography Matters, 143. 36 4 Many of the photographs mentioned here may be viewed online in reduced form; for example, the Andreas Gursky image at http:// 37 media2.moma.org/collection_images/resized/433/w500h420/ 38 CRI_81433.jpg and the Jeff Wall image (discussed earlier) at http:// 39 hammer.ucla.edu/image/449/600/450.jpg 40 5 In Absorption and Theatricality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 41 Fried writes, ‘nowhere in the pages that follow is an effort made to connect 42 the art and criticism under discussion with the social, economic, and 43 political reality of the age’ (p. 4). CRIQ 1868  Reviews: ‘The spectator is called to take part’ 117 1 6 Diane Arbus and Doon Arbus, Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph (New 2 York: Aperture, 1972), 1; quoted in Fried, Why Photography Matters, 208. 3 7 Ariella Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography, 169. All subsequent 4 references to this text will appear in parentheses in the text. 5 6 Further reading 7 Barthes, Roland, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard (1980; London: 8 Vintage, 2000). 9 Didi-Huberman, Georges, Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from 10 Auschwitz, trans. Shane B. Lillis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). 11 Eisenman, Stephen, The Abu Ghraib Effect (London: Reaktion, 2007). 12 Elkins, James (ed.), Photography Theory (London: Routledge, 2006). 13 Fried, Michael, Absorption and Theatricality (Chicago: University of Chicago 14 Press, 1988). Sontag, Susan, Regarding the Pain of Others, 2nd edn (London: Penguin, 2004). 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 (BWUK CRIQ 1868.PDF 30-Apr-09 21:0 87505 Bytes 8 PAGES n operator=M.Chackalayil) 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 CRIQ 1868 Author Query Form _______________________________________________________ Journal CRIQ Article 1868 _______________________________________________________ Dear Author, During the copy-editing of your paper, the following queries arose. Please respond to these by marking up your proofs with the necessary changes/additions. Please write your answers clearly on the query sheet if there is insufficient space on the page proofs. If returning the proof by fax do not write too close to the paper's edge. Please remember that illegible mark-ups may delay publication. Query No. Description Author Response No Queries .