Ch. 3: Jeff Wall, Wittgenstein, and The Everyday

The main focus of this section of Fried's Why Photoraphy Matters As Art As Never Before focuses mainly on some of Jeff Wall's photographs, what Jeff Wall has to say about these photographs, and how these "everyday" images mirror the concepts of Wittgenstein's thought experiment and that of the absorptivity.

Wall, Fried feels, has moved from what he would call "obviously staged images" into images that Wall refers to as "neo-realist" or "near documentary" (he describes near documentary as scenes that once existed but were not photographed at the time, so he recreates them as they seemed to be and shoots them as if they were happening in real time.) Though he does shoot some actual documentary images, Wall is sure to label them as such and keep them separate from his other forms of photography. The neo-realist title that Wall gives his photographs comes from the lack of their obvious stagedness that his previous photos, like Dead Troops Talk (Photo 1) and Picture For Women (Photo 2), readily show to the viewer. (Though he does say that art should show somewhat how it came to be, which for him, would be to let in on some of the stagedness in his photographs.) However, if one was not told that Wall's neo-realist images were not straight photography, the photographs might be mistaken for his actual documentary photographs. The reason for this, and the way Wall creates this sense of realism, is by using everyday scenes/actions/ideas and weaving through, almost seamlessly, the concept of absorptivity.

The absorptive, as Fried talked about in chapter one in some detail, relates to the theatrical/anti-theatrical aspects of the actions within the image. Does the subject know we're viewing him/her? If they are aware of our viewing presence, are they pretending to ignore that we even exist in this viewing, or are they acting in the absorptive for our entertainment, purely as an act? All of these questions were brought up in Fried's third beginning toward the end of his chapter 1, but are still valid questions when dealing with the absorptive in imagery (and Wittgenstein brings up a thought activity relating to the extraordinary experience of viewing the absorptive activity of another, which I will talk about further ahead.) As for Wall, he decides that these activities will be absorptive activities, but that the viewer will play a role in the images as well (in other words, the subject/s are basically aware that they are being viewed, but act as if they are not seen.) In doing so, Wall is able to create these images, over the course of 2 weeks per image, that appear to be almost candid shots of somebody who (to the audience's point of view) may not be fully aware that they are being photographed and seem to be fully absorbed in their everyday activity (photo 3 Morning Cleaner, photo 4 Housekeeping, photo 5 Woman with a Covered Tray).

The "everyday" that Wall portrays in his images is not without reasons that relate directly back to the miracle of art and how it can be viewed and looked upon in different ways by different viewers. Wittgenstein here says that it is remarkable to look upon something and see it as art versus looking upon the same thing without thinking of art at all. In the former, one may see that the "everyday" actions are a miracle to look upon when seen with artist's eyes, but in the latter, the appearance of the image or object becomes just that: an object. It is not meaningful, it is not mind opening, it is not a miracle, it is simply an object. Because Wall's images are meant to be viewed as art, he is then giving the viewer a phenomenal gift: seeing an everyday action that appears to not yet be contaminated by the presence of an immediate viewer. This brings me to Wittgenstein's "thought activity" (see above diagram). Ludwig Wittgenstein, an Austrian philosopher in the first half of the 20th century, created a thought activity that goes like this: imagine you are in a theatre and on stage there is a man pacing back and forth, lighting a cigarette, sitting down, completely unaware of an audience at all. This man is doing the things that he does when nobody is around to see them done. In this activity, there is a barrier between the audience and the pacing man, where the man is actually in his flat, performing his everyday tasks to himself, and the audience is able to view this as if it were being presented on a stage in front of them. It is something we cannot ever view, this purely individual action, because although we've happened upon people acting in the everyday by themselves, the moment where they do not realize we are there lasts only briefly, and we are not able to view it in the same perspective (with the same admiration for its beauty and pureness) as we would looking upon this man with the lit cigarette. The ideas in this thought activity are directly mimicked in Wall's photographs of the everyday (whether he knew about Wittgenstein's ideas or not), and these photographs can therefore be viewed in the same manner: with wonder and a realization of its untouched beauty.

Jeff Wall creates these images of the everyday, of people being absorbed in these everyday scenes, of the beauty (when viewed as art and from with an artist's mind) of these previously unobserved, pure moments. Fried quoted Heidegger earlier in the chapter as saying that our absorption in the everyday is essentially our "falling" into the world and as Pippin points out, our self-conscious realization of how we go about in that world and how/where we choose so situate ourselves into said world. We become so absorbed in the world, we tend to miss its phenomenal aspects. Wall seems to fills these moments that we miss with his images, almost as if to show us that it's not too late to still marvel at these moments of intrinsic beauty.

Photo 1 - Dead Troops Talk

Photo 2 - Picture For Women

Photo 3 - Morning Cleaning

Photo 4 - Housekeeping

Photo 5 - Woman with a Covered Tray

*As a side note, some of Wall's earlier works remind me a lot of Gregory Crewdson's photographs, what with the elaborate set ups, the amount of work needing to be done, etc: Dead Troops Talk is one of these, and The Flooded Grave is another, seen here.

The Flooded Grave

Gregory Crewdson - Untitled (Ophelia)

Gregory Crewdson - Untitled

The cinematic effect is prominent more so in Crewdson's work, as he strives to make his images very dramatic and set up, but I found that Wall, especially in Dead Troops Talk, does a bit of the same in the stagedness.

Fried (Intro and Ch. 1): The Audience.

In the first chapter of his book Why Photography Matters As Art As Never Before, Michael Fried Breaks down his discussion into what he calls "The Three Beginnings". These three beginnings each touch upon the validity of the audience, and the effect upon the art pieces (mainly photographs, but his metaphor is discussing voyeurism through writings) when an audience views them.

This first "beginning" focuses mainly on the theatricality of photography, specifically in Cindy Sherman's Untitled Film Stills, Hiroshi Sugimoto's Movie Theaters, and Jeff Wall's Movie Audience, and the tension between their theatricality and the lack thereof. The above diagram indicates each of these photographer's works on a scale from theatrical to non-theatrical. Starting with Jeff Wall's Movie Audience, we can see that there are seven people who appear to be looking up at a movie. However, the belief that they are actually looking at a real movie screen in an actual theater (as the title would like you to "believe") fades instantly as the viewer notices the perfectly even lighting on each subject's face, and the brightness of it compared to an actual movie. There is also a hairlight behind each subject, slightly illuminating the backs of their heads as well. These clues bring us out of the movie theater and into a photo studio, where the people are posing for Wall purely for the creation of the image. This "stagedness", as Fried puts it, is what makes this work theatrical. However, in a gallery setting, some of this theatricality fades out, as Wall puts these images on a lightbox and proceeds to place them above eye level, removing the connection one usually gets when staring directly at a photograph or art piece at eye level.

Next, Sherman's Movie Stills land somewhere right in the middle of the theatrical scale. Fried starts by giving us a description and reasons as to why Sherman's work is non-theatrical, regardless of the fact that she has created these scenes herself, of herself, with the intention to create scenes of nonexistent movies (which are usually non-theatrical, but I'll talk about that in a minute). She creates this work in a non-theatrical style by using lighting that appears to be natural lighting (or at least not over the top cliche movie-style lighting), she distances herself from the viewer by never looking through the photograph to us, or even acknowledging our presence, and she will sometimes distance herself (scale-wise) in the photograph to be further away from the lens, and therefore further away from the viewer. However, Fried then goes on to say that, although these are all valid points, there are some things that we cannot deny. For instance, Sherman does not bother to cover up the fact that she is indeed creating these scenes and staging a "reality" that does not exist. She will often times leave the shutter release in her hand to show you this. Here we can see this tension that her work draws between the lines of theatrical and non-theatrical.

Hiroshi Sugimoto's Movie Theaters falls closest to the non-theatrical side in comparison to the other two photographer's works. These theaters show us what an entire movie looks like in a single exposure. As one looks closer at the image, they will notice that this brilliant white screen has illuminated slightly the room in which the screen is located. The soft glow on the rest of the theater is enough to make clear that there is no audience in the chairs. Sugimoto does not allude to any existence of audience within these theaters, past, present, or future, or to the audience looking at these photographs. There is no connection between the viewer and the photograph because there is nothing to point out that we at some point were there, or that we have some reason to have any sort of emotional connection with the photos. Sugimoto also shoots at a point of view that is not usually seen of a theater by the average movie-goer, separating the viewer even more from the theaters. However, I believe that there is still something to be said about the photographs' theatricality (what little there may be), that the scene is an unlikely one of a movie being played to an empty audience. This draws up questions for me, such as "Why is the movie reeling if there is nobody to watch it?" and "Were there ever people in the theater at any time previous?" and even further detached "Are there people left in the world?" to which I have no answers, but the thought of these questions and potential answers brings up a certain amount of emotion or feeling in my viewing of the photographs. This small emotional "twitch" would seem to add some theatricality to the image, at least for me, and would remove Sugimoto slightly from the non-theatrical node on the above scale.

Though these three works all relate to the common subject of "The Movie", they all incorporate some form of theatricality into them. They are imitations of what surrounds a movie and therefore cannot be completely non-theatrical as Fried says that movies are. When he said that the cinema does not have a theatrical aspect, I was inclined to disagree. What could possibly be more theatrical? As I continued reading, it became clear to me that what makes a cinema experience non-theatrical was not the film itself, but the experience of the audience to that film. Theatricality demands that the viewer feel some sort of "responsibility" to the piece, or some strong urge toward themselves or their inner emotions when viewing said film. However, when people go to see a movie, they go to leave themselves, and their own views behind, and opt to be sucked into this almost "out of body experience" where they become part of the film and their physical bodies have nothing to do with what his happening before their eyes. This separation from self would create this non-theatricality and doesn't even allow room for a theatrical side. Though there are exceptions to this (such as documentaries, educational films, etc), it was fitting to place the cinema at the farthest point of non-theatricality.

Continuing with the validity and relationship of the audience to the photographs, Fried delves into the second "beginning", talking about the new regime in photography as having two main points:

1. There is a jump into large scale prints, multiple feet by multiple feet.
2. There is an intention that these prints are to be hung on a wall in a gallery, and this intention starts from the moment the photographer has the idea of an image in their mind. The photographs are made to be walked up to, looked at, and walked away from.

This jump in size, first of all, made way for photographers, like Jeff Wall and Stephen Shore and Jean-Marc Bustamante, to create crisp, large format photographs that were able to be blown up to sizes comparable to paintings. At these sizes, the acute attention to detail became a prominent factor in viewing the images, whereas the images that were smaller in size and meant to be copied into books, magazines, and held in the hand, could not compare.

For Thomas Ruff, the immensity of his portraits of seemingly expressionless people draws the viewer into the image (or maybe it draws the image out into the same room as the viewer), and calls upon this viewer to respond to its complexities and immediacy. These images are meant to challenge their audience, and their scale helps in this mission by removing the photographs as physical objects and recreating them as forces with which you encounter as you look upon them. The incorporation of the audience in this way draws directly back to the "argument" of theatricality (or non-theatricality), falling neatly at the theatrical node (although not in relation to movies this time).

Bustamante takes a slightly different route with his images. Though he is printing large scale like Ruff, his images do not challenge the viewer for an interaction, or invite them to walk in the landscapes he has photographed. Bustamante's photographs are non-imaginative, and involve no guesswork. They are straightforward images of information, overwhelming in their flatness, sharpness, and sheer size. However, they are not completely non-theatrical. Though the actual image does not necessarily interact with the audience, the photographs do call upon this audience to become responsible for what they are viewing (his photographs are mainly images of traces of man's impact upon the world). He does this by his size, use of dull colors, the mass amount of information he captures with his 8x10, and the lack of shadows and specific focal point in the image (he shoots mainly at midday and does not allow one thing to stand out more than anything else in his photographs).

Taking the middle ground between Thomas Ruff and Jean-Marc Bustamante, is Stephen Shore, creating images of scenes with great depth and attention to shadow, color, and detail. His photographs are not theatrical, as they do not confront the audience as Ruff's did, and they do not call for responsibility from the audience as Bustamante's did. These photographs invite the viewer into their space, allowing the audience to step through the frame and explore the corners of the image and the miles of depth that it shows. The only incorporation of the viewer to the photograph is this exploration. It is not, however, a contextual exploration, but an aesthetic one. The link to Shore's photographs is one of visual pleasure, of being looked at, appreciated, and walked away from.

The third "beginning" that Fried explores is the idea of voyeurism through three different readings: Yukion Mishima's The Temple of Dawn, an anonymous author's Adelaïde, ou la femme morte d'amour, and Susan Sontag's Regarding the Pain of Others. Fried talks a bit about each story and how voyeurism plays into each one, and then compares it lightly to photography. He disproves that the photographic audience is voyeuristic because the idea of voyeurism is that whatever it is that the audience wants to see is something which they are not supposed to be viewing (such as the protagonist in The Temple of Dawn) and that after this "thing" is viewed, everything has changed and taken a complete turn, which can only be fixed and brought back to equilibrium by death of the voyeuristic person(s). Photography is not at all viewed in a voyeuristic manner. Whether the photographer wants the audience to become theatrically involved in his photographs, or have absolutely no part in his photographs, he has still created these images to be viewed. Most photographs are not created to visually incorporate an audience, they are simply, well, what they are. Because of this, there technically is no audience, and without an audience, there is no purity to contaminate by viewing the images.


As one can see, the audience takes on quite an important roll in the viewing of photography. Though many times the theatricality of an image is directly dependent on the individual (and their experiences and ideas) and the photograph, we can see that photographs can be generally determined theatrical or non-theatrical, and that there are still many factors that can contribute to this determination.

The Breakdown of The Contemporary

Through three readings, "Questionnaire on The Contemporary, October from Fall 2009" with Alexander Alberro's response, Terry Smith's "Contemporary Art and Contemporaneity", and Leesham & Wright's "Review of Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before and The Civil Contract of Photography", the contemporary as a word, as a movement, and as an idea was broken down and analyzed piece by piece in the attempt to create some form of solidarity within its meaning. As seen in the above mind map, the success of this quest for a true definition is still somewhat questionable.

Starting right off with Alberro's response, there are contrasts of meaning and ideas behind what the contemporary is. On one hand, Alberro implies that the contemporary we have found ourselves in at the present moment was brought upon by a seamless pass from the past into the present, or from the modern, through the postmodern, and into the contemporary, with little weight on the bordering lines between these three movements. On the other hand, there is an implication that the break to contemporary was just that: a radical break into the 1990's to present day. Though these two polar opposite ideas of movement are both valid in their own right, it is unclear as to which, if either, can take the top spot in helping to form a definition of the contemporary. Because of this, and I believe as with most major movements, both will have to do for the time being. Continuing forward, Alberro brings up a major point of debate in the discussions of what the contemporary entails. He states that the contemporary is a period in which you can place changes in concepts, movements, and, most importantly globalization. Globalization here is the integration of global ideas, economy, and movements, often coming together under hegemony. In considering that the contemporary would be globalized, there will also be the accompaniment of followers and oppositionists, each attempting to make their influences known. This constant clash of ideas and theories directly parallels the clash of ideas that attempt to define the contemporary, and this tension is part of what makes up the movement.

In Terry Smith's "Contemporary Art and Contemporaneity", the differences between the modern, postmodern, and contemporary are brought to light, weighing more heavily on what the contemporary is and how it differs from the two former. Possibly seen more clearly through contradictions in the mind map, contemporary is:

• global
• an integration of technology
• a reinvention of concepts
• imagined (vs. the stable and tangible of the modern and postmodern)
• aesthetic
• a participation of the people
• unsettled
• a period
• ambiguous/mobility of meaning
• closure/openness
• nonuniversal
• alive
• the new modern
• non-literal
• timeless
• revealing
• contaminated
• confrontational

Specifically with the contemporary's break from postmodernism, Smith comments on what contemporaneity is: the inclusion of modernity and post modernity, but encompassing a broader meaning into the present, near future, and future. Though, keeping with the contradictions, it is also said that the modern is the futuristic mindset, whereas the contemporary is the present, and the present alone. I personally cannot say that either are wrong, but mainly that it would depend on the events, ideas, or art being analyzed. One problem with "period movements" is that many would like them to be set in stone and the products of these movements be black and white: either part of the movement or not. But because the contemporary has influences like no other movement has had, what with technology, globalization, and the integration of the world's knowledge all accessible through the internet, shades of gray are exponentially increasing between the seams of the contemporary, pulling it to its limits, its breaking point, and its ultimate success as an individual movement.

However, in getting to this point, the contemporary has faced the same challenges in the past 3 decades as all other period movements have faced (namely the modern and postmodern), with low acceptance rates at first, and a slow incline of the collection of ideas, theories, and art into an ultimate acceptance that has spread worldwide, hand in hand with the globalization of the turn of the century. Though the words "modern" and "contemporary" are still paired, as Smith shows us, they have broken off from each other (though they will never be completely separate, as the contemporary has grown from the basis of the modern, and this cornerstone cannot be removed.) As the contemporary has taken shape, Smith talks about the "Passage Between Cultures", which proves that the globalization of the movement has fully taken hold. The contemporary does not discriminate between borders or world classification, as contemporary art, events, and ideas have been born in first, second, third, and fourth world countries, and even parts of the world that may seem to have settled comfortable in the modern, have put forth contemporary work. This forward movement of the entire globe has created this outcome of the changes that have occurred in the past 30 years from which art has been based upon these events and not a mold of formalism like the previous modern and postmodern were based. It is truly a free flowing, open ended movement.

The third reading, from Leesham & Wright's "Review of Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before and The Civil Contract of Photography" breaks away from analyzing what the contemporary is, and focuses more on how we perceive it. Fried relies more on the view that the contemporary art has an aesthetic to it that will encompass the viewer as they are viewing it, and will draw them to the edges of the piece, but that the interaction will stop there. That there is nothing more than the object as its art, and that it should not be considered more than that. However, Azoulay (again adding to the contrasting ideas within contemporaneity) says that while there can be an aesthetic portion to any art piece, that the main reason of the existence of the works is to make a meaningful statement that draws the viewer in and demands a participation and understanding into what the art piece shows. Azoulay believes that the observer should walk away even feeling a sense of responsibility for things that they just viewed, and want to do something about it, not feel satisfied with the aesthetics of the piece and quickly forget about it.

Although there may never be a solid definition of the contemporary movement and what it fully entails, there are many branches of what the contemporary currently is and how these current trends have shaped the period and differentiated it from the modern and postmodern periods before it. The clashing of ideas and theories that weave themselves through the contemporary are what strengthen its fibers and give it the backbone to keep growing and changing.