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.