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Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before by Michael Fried, and The
Civil Contract of Photography by Ariella Azoulay

Article  in  Critical Quarterly · July 2009

DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8705.2009.01868.x

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 Reviews
NOAM LESHEM AND LAUREN A. WRIGHT

Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before

by Michael Fried
Yale University Press, 2008, 409 pp., ISBN 978-0-300-13684-5

The Civil Contract of Photography

by Ariella Azoulay
Zone Books, 2008, 585 pp., ISBN 978-1-890-95188-7

What does it mean to look at a photograph? What is our role as

spectators and how are we to perform it? Two major recent publications
take up these questions. The two books’ approaches to answering them,
however, seem to diverge so widely as to be hardly comparable. The
subject of Michael Fried’s eagerly awaited new book is spectatorial
relations in recent art photography, which he articulates in terms of
distance, whereas Ariella Azoulay’s book (which was originally
published in Hebrew in 2006) questions this kind of aesthetic distance
by arguing for the ethical responsibility of viewers toward photographic
images of violence and suffering. Nevertheless, taken together, these
two categorically different projects sketch out the parameters that have
defined recent critical work on the subject of photography’s spectators.
Fried addresses a shift in photographic practice since the 1970s from
establishing a one-to-one relationship with the viewer, either in small-
scale framed prints or between the covers of books, to a much more
public and explicitly ‘artistic’ form. Contemporary artists exemplary of
this shift include Jeff Wall (he gets the most attention, two whole
chapters), Thomas Struth, Thomas Ruff, Andreas Gursky, Rineke
Dijkstra, Thomas Demand, and Candida Höfer, among others. All these
artists make use of what the French critic Jean-François Chevrier has
called the ‘tableau form’: printed at large scale, their photographs are
‘designed and produced for the wall’.1 For Fried, this turn from realist
intimacy to grandiloquent artifice is significant. ‘The moment this
[shift] took place,’ Fried contends, ‘issues concerning the relationship
between the photograph and the viewer standing before it became
crucial for photography as they had never previously been.’
114 Critical Quarterly, vol. 51, no. 2

Fried’s aim in the book is to describe this viewing relationship in the

terms he had first articulated in his seminal but ‘‘infamous’’ (Fried’s
own word) essay of 1967, ‘Art and Objecthood’.2 There he established
an opposition between Minimalist sculpture’s ‘bad’ theatricality, which
addressed itself directly to its viewer, and the ‘good’ antitheatricality of
modernist sculptors like Anthony Caro, whose work he understood as
self-contained, in no way constructed by the viewer’s experience of it.
Fried later developed this opposition in an art-historical rather than
critical mode, with regard to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French
painting up to Manet, in three books. The title of the first of these
books, Absorption and Theatricality, is indicative of the two opposed
tendencies that Fried identified in painting of this time (the other two
books are Courbet’s Realism and Manet’s Modernism). He argues that the
best paintings display a mode of ‘absorption’: figures are depicted as
engrossed in their own activities, so denying ‘the presence before them
of the beholder’ and establishing ‘the ontological fiction that the
beholder does not exist’ (p. 40). The effect, in Fried’s view, is to
encourage the viewer to examine the painting’s details, rather than to
feel addressed by it directly in a ‘theatrical’ mode. In Manet’s paintings,
however, the absorptive mode gives way to what Fried calls a ‘radical
‘‘facingness’’’ or ‘surface orientation’ (pp. 40, 151). The figures within
the picture confront the beholder directly, while revealing little; rather
than creating an imaginative dialogue with the viewer, the figures’
paintedness becomes apparent. Manet’s Olympia (1843) is depicted
(shockingly, for the time) fully naked as a contemporary courtesan, yet
her expression is blank and her body is rendered flatly, expressly
painted rather than ‘real’. The effect is to further distance the viewer.
Manet’s is a seemingly paradoxical mode of address; the paintings
simultaneously confront the viewer, only in order to withdraw. In Why
Photography Matters, Fried suggests that this paradox is key to
understanding the work of recent artist-photographers. Their photo-
graphs ‘aspire to . . . the rhetorical, or beholder-addressing significance
of paintings while at the same time declaring their artifactual identity
as photographs’ (p. 37). As in the best French paintings before Manet,
Fried argues that these contemporary artists often depict their subjects
in an ‘absorptive’ mode, engaged in some activity which causes them
not to address the camera. For example, the man depicted in Jeff Wall’s
After ‘Invisible Man’ by Ralph Ellison, the Prologue (1999–2001) sits facing
away from the viewer. Yet while the figure looks away, the image
acknowledges its ‘to-be-seenness’ by means of the profusion of detail in
his carefully constructed surroundings (Wall is well known for being a
digital compositor – scenes are not only staged but also worked over
and added to with computer software). The complexity of the image
 Reviews: Across the disciplines 115

does not make its meaning more apparent to the viewer; on the
contrary, it ‘on the one hand reduces to a minimum any tendency on
the part of the viewer to ‘‘identify’’ with the protagonist and on the
other actively promotes . . . imaginative engagement and philosophical
reflection’ (p. 50).
Wall is not alone in his deployment of strategies which, in this
paradoxical way, stage a to-be-seenness while at the same time
‘restoring the distance necessary for [a] confrontational experience’.3
Fried notes that Andreas Gursky achieves much the same effect in his
large and colourful images, using impossibly precise detail, but also by
employing improbable vantage points and other distancing devices. In
Swimming Pool, Ratingen (1987), one of his most important photographs
from the late eighties, Gursky depicts a large public swimming pool
with bright blue water and dark green grass and forest beyond. Many
of the tiny figures in and around the pool are depicted with such
clarity, despite the distance of the camera’s elevated vantage, that
minute personal dramas are detectable among them.4 Fried acknowl-
edges that the image could function as a ‘sociological document’ (p.
160) of young German men and women at a certain place and time (and
it has been read as such by other critics), but he favours a reading of the
image in terms of the viewer’s ‘feeling of remaining wholly outside the
proceedings the picture depicts’ (pp. 160–61). Similarly, for Fried,
Thomas Struth’s photographs of gallery-goers in museums depict, even
dramatise, self-reflexively, the non-communicating ‘worlds’ of art-
works and their viewers, through signs of disjunction between them.
Likewise, Thomas Ruff’s portraits of his Düsseldorf art school
colleagues retain their passport photo impersonality, despite their
large scale, and Candida Höfer’s sumptuous interiors avoid inviting
the viewer in through their rich engagement with the details of the
spaces.
Fried’s arguments with regard to these artists are generally
convincing on his own quite expansive and expandable terms, even
if they are by no means the only way these works could be read.
However, Fried’s enthusiasm for re-establishing the relevance of his
critical frame to contemporary work means that he does not address
the historical image-making conditions under which the photographs
were made, which differ significantly from those surrounding French
painting or even minimalist sculpture – that is, an environment where
photographic images, especially of violence, proliferate, and we
viewers must determine how to respond. Fried’s position is predicated
on that response being primarily aesthetic in keeping with his broadly
modernist project. Here we begin to see the potential problems of
Fried’s well-trodden argument as it is applied to photography,
116 Critical Quarterly, vol. 51, no. 2

especially in reference to Azoulay’s position. We might suspect that an

ethic of separation between ‘art’ and ‘non-art’ photographs is a subtext
to Fried’s argument, where the former should not dare address itself to
such difficult subjects for fear of instrumentalising them in the name of
aesthetics. Such an explicit or implicit image-politics is entirely absent
from the book, however, and his previous writings disavow such a
position.5 This is not necessarily a problem for the more explicitly
aesthetic work he discusses, like those referred to above, but when the
content of the images lends itself to a more political reading, the
slipperiness of Fried’s position begins to show. For example, Fried says
that large-scale photographs by former photojournalist Luc Delahaye
taken during conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq and the Gaza Strip are more
concerned with ‘an artistic . . . ideal of allowing the picture in all its
density of both reference and of colour to come into being of its own
accord’ (p. 184). Yet as Fried himself notes, Delahaye frames his images
so that they appear as though we could walk straight in. For Fried, this
falls on the side of disinterestedness and transparency over the
reportorial precision of photojournalism. This might be true, as the
images certainly do not function in a photojournalistic mode if only
because of their ‘tableau’ scale. But we might ask why we as viewers
are positioned by the images ‘in’ these scenes with their signs of far-off
violence – plumes of smoke, a destroyed refugee camp. Surely if we are
‘there’, we have some relationship to, perhaps even some implied
responsibility for, those markers of damage.
Similarly Fried reads Rineke Dijkstra’s portraits of teenagers on
beaches as another example of ‘to-be-seenness’ without theatricality.
These are images that, according to him, play on the gap between the
subjects’ awareness and unconsciousness. They disclose what Diane
Arbus called ‘the gap between intention and effect’ in photography6 –
certain photographic portraits make visible the ways in which subjects
want to present themselves to the camera, but also the ways in which
this intended self-fashioning falls short and is undone by unintended
effects that creep into the frame. Susan Sontag, among others, criticised
Arbus’s exploitation of that gap, which makes her subjects appear
ridiculous, as ‘freaks’. Fried suggests that Dijkstra’s work ‘has nothing
of the ethical difficulties raised by Arbus’s’ primarily because her
subjects are nicer to look at (p. 210). However, such a project is never
insulated from ethical issues, as the subject is always giving over some
control of their image to the viewer. This is even more apparent in
Dijkstra’s other photographs, mentioned briefly in the book, of people
having just undergone a major life experience – an Israeli soldier after
shooting a gun for the first time, and a nude mother holding her baby
just after giving birth. The former radiates with excessive machismo,
 Reviews: Across the disciplines 117

while the latter appears terribly vulnerable, a stream of blood just

visible as it runs down her leg. We as viewers are certainly called upon
to judge both the ethics of the photographic situation, and that of our
relationship to the people pictured. But Fried expressly avoids telling
us how to respond to such a situation. Photography ‘matters as art’, for
Fried, precisely because as art it need not, indeed must not, require us
to respond, because we are not directly addressed. Such a position
might be convincing where the ethical stakes of the images are lower.
But in reference to Delahaye and Dijkstra’s work, there is a distinct risk
of draining the images of their political potential and so actually
undermining the position of the people and places depicted.
Though she addresses a very different image corpus, one that is in
sharp contrast to Fried’s, Ariella Azoulay wishes to examine just these
dynamics of the viewer’s responsibility to what they see. The Civil
Contract of Photography emerged out of the author’s longstanding
concern with the images coming out of the Palestinian occupied
territories and the form of engagement they were calling for. She posits
the question simply: ‘Why are they looking at me?’7. She contends that
artistic discourse provides little help in adequately accounting for the
role and responsibility of the spectator. Postmodern theories of
photography like Sontag’s proved almost as limited, proclaiming that
viewers have become desensitised to the glut of images of war,
destruction and loss. At most, we are asked to regard the pain of others,
show sympathy to their suffering.
The Palestinian women and men who feature in the photographs
Azoulay discusses are not looking for polite compassion. They are
often gazing straight into a camera held by a photographer, and beyond
it, to potential viewers. The photographs coming from the occupied
territories are of people injured by a state that does not consider them
as citizens, shirking responsibility for their fate and the damage they
suffer. Yet at the same time, in their photographs, they appear as
plaintiffs, addressers of claims that assume that in the realm of the
photograph – in the encounter between photographed subject,
photographer, camera and spectator – they are legitimate, rightful
participants. It is from this scene that Azoulay begins to illustrate the
dynamic and reciprocal relations that constitute the photograph as a
civil space, organised by an unwritten yet clearly identifiable contract
between its participants.
Acknowledging the civil space opened by photography also brings
about the recognition that its addressee, the spectator, can no longer
occupy a position of a passive beholder, for, as such, one is only asked
to observe and contemplate a stationary object that is readily accessible
to immediate and exhaustive viewing. The civil contract formed
118 Critical Quarterly, vol. 51, no. 2

through and around the photograph does not rule out such a position,
but this, Azoulay solemnly reminds us, will have a direct impact on the
ability of the image to operate as an instrument through which claims
and arguments are transmitted into the civil realm. It is at this point
that spectatorship emerges as part of the ethical dimension of civic
responsibility: without a willing labour of spectatorship, the photo-
graph is left as a flawed statement, an impaired attempt to convey a
sense of urgency. Moreover, this urgency is a directly political one – it is
framed not as an appeal for passive empathy but as a call to action.
In the face of photographs of destruction and human suffering,
Azoulay insists, the spectators are asked to take part. They are required
‘to move from the addressee’s position to the addresser’s position [and]
to take responsibility for the sense of such photographs by addressing
them even further’ (p. 169). Through detailed analysis, Azoulay illus-
trates the empowering force of such ‘skilled observation’ (p. 168). In
one such example, of a Palestinian merchant from Hebron looking
directly into the camera, we first encounter the claim that is staged
through the photographic event. The man presents the broken padlock
of his store, which was forced open by Israeli soldiers sent to break a
trade strike. Azoulay calls on spectators to place themselves in a
position that responds to the merchant’s claim, that recognises ‘that
what they are witnessing is intolerable’ (p. 18).
The meticulous attention Azoulay gives to these photographs is
inspiring. She discusses, for instance, a photograph of two Palestinian
women who were forced to go into labour while at Israeli checkpoints,
which resulted, in both cases, in the death of the babies. Yet in the
photo, one of the women looks calmly at the camera, her face serene,
even joyous (p. 381). To decipher the woman’s composure, Azoulay
meets with the Israeli photographer, examines the entire series taken
that day, but admits that it remains inscrutable. This indecipherability
also ‘makes present the open abyss between occupiers and occupied
[. . .] as well as the uselessness of any empathy or sorrow after the
fact, which will never amount to more than self righteous gestures’
(p. 380).
This sensitive mode of spectatorship seems a daunting one to parlay
into an active contract. Azoulay states that her concern is specifically
with photographs of Palestinians and women, but it is unclear whether
this spectatorial mode of responsibility is also required beyond this
image corpus. Furthermore, while it might be true that ‘No special
talent is needed in order to listen to an injury claim’ (p. 143), other skills
and knowledge may well be required in order to identify and decode
the sense of emergency implicit in many of these photographs.
Azoulay’s emphasis on the process of becoming spectator, the need
 Reviews: Across the disciplines 119

to engage attentively with an ever growing mass of images containing

violent scenes of injury and destruction, does not address the limits of
one’s capacity to sustain this arduous process over time. Despite her
objection to the assertion that spectators have been ‘fatigued’ and have
‘stopped looking’ (p. 11), she does not directly respond to the risk of
overexposure.
Azoulay’s book is a timely and important contribution that
resuscitates a sober sense of responsibility. Azoulay sensitively engages
with the photographs she discusses, many of which depict explicit
violence, and avoids any pathos in her conclusions. For Fried’s part, his
book gives thorough analysis of important developments in photo-
graphic practice, and his persistence in pursuit of his argument across
such a diversity of work is admirable, as is his call for others to ‘offer
superior interpretations of their own’ (p. 2). Surely these two scholars
understand the function of photography, and the spectator before it,
very differently. Indeed, they each demonstrate the problem of taking
the other’s argument to its logical extreme. Fried makes an important
effort to stake out a distinct space for viewing photographs as objects of
aesthetic and philosophical interest, but Azoulay demonstrates that in
some cases to do so might risk missing the photographic image’s
ethical demand for recognition and action.

Notes
1 Jean-François Chevrier, ‘The Adventures of the Picture Form in the History
of Photography’ (1989), trans. Michael Gilson, in The Last Picture Show:
Artists Using Photography, 1960–1982, ed. Douglas Fogle (Minneapolis:
Walker Art Center, 2003), 116; Michael Fried, Why Photography Matters as Art
as Never Before, 143. All subsequent references to Fried’s book will appear in
parentheses in the text.
2 See Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1998).
3 Chevrier, ‘Adventures of the Picture Form’, 116; quoted in Fried, Why
Photography Matters, 143.
4 Many of the photographs mentioned here may be viewed online in reduced
form; for example, the Andreas Gursky image at http://media2.moma.org/
collection_images/resized/433/w500h420/CRI_81433.jpg and the Jeff Wall
image (discussed earlier) at http://hammer.ucla.edu/image/449/600/
450.jpg
5 In Absorption and Theatricality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988),
Fried writes, ‘nowhere in the pages that follow is an effort made to connect
the art and criticism under discussion with the social, economic, and
political reality of the age’ (p. 4).
120 Critical Quarterly, vol. 51, no. 2

6 Diane Arbus and Doon Arbus, Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph (New
York: Aperture, 1972), 1; quoted in Fried, Why Photography Matters, 208.
7 Ariella Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography, 18. All subsequent
references to this text will appear in parentheses in the text.

Further reading
Barthes, Roland, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard (1980; London:
Vintage, 2000).
Didi-Huberman, Georges, Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from
Auschwitz, trans. Shane B. Lillis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).
Eisenman, Stephen, The Abu Ghraib Effect (London: Reaktion, 2007).
Elkins, James (ed.), Photography Theory (London: Routledge, 2006).
Fried, Michael, Absorption and Theatricality (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1988).
Sontag, Susan, Regarding the Pain of Others, 2nd edn (London: Penguin, 2004).

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