Reinhardt and Azoulay

The two readings Isn't This The Most Civil of Claims? by Ariella Azoulay, as an essay for Gillian Laub's photographs entitled "Testimony", and Mark Reinhardt's Picturing violence: Aesthetics and The Anxiety of Critique both break down how one sees a/o should see photographs that were taken to relay a message to the viewer. Though both quite different in claims, and both bringing different issues to the plate, the two readings do overlap slightly.

Reinhardt's focus is on the aesthetic of the images. Right off, he brings about questions of the possibility for the overpowering of aestheticism and what aesthetics really means. Because there was not a specific definition of "aesthetic" brought to the reading (Reinhardt states that it can be as narrow as beautification for pleasure and as open as sensory perception) and because the definition can encompass almost two complete opposite ideas, it seemed to me that the rest of his argument here seemed sort of arbitrary.

Since I have strong opinions that contradict Reinhardt's, I'll start with laying out some of what he said. He posed the problem that it is possible that a photograph's aestheticism may lessen the response of the viewer to the actual event within the image (and these images he is talking about are images of suffering). He uses the photographs from the prisoner abuse at Abu Graib as his first example of people's reactions to what photographs may show (not so much talking about aestheticism here, but more so how people respond to images of suffering alone). When these photos of torture were taken, they were not exactly to give people an update and documentary evidence of what is going on in the war and how it's happening, but they were being used as a secondary torture device: to exploit these people being tortured by showing the world their naked bodies being dragged, tied, or electrocuted, and sometimes even showing their faces to verify their identities to the world. These are not documentary, photojournalistic wartime photographs; they are methods of torture and bring up the questions 'Does our viewing of these photographs tell us anything or make us feel anything? Or do they just prolong the suffering of the individuals in the images? Are we making ourselves more knowledgeable of their situation, or are we simply adding to their humiliation?' For me, it was more of a moral debate about if I should view them to be informed (because they are events that, no matter how horrible, did happen), even if it prolongs the suffering of those pictured. I still do not have an answer to this, but I'm not sure there is a straightforward, no strings attached way to come to a conclusion about it. What I found interesting about others' views on the matter was the media's decisions of whether to show it or not, and their reasons for doing so. Some journals and newspapers said that the photographs were indecent for public eye because of nudity, and some showed the photographs but blurred the nudity, appearing to make these images more "socially acceptable". However, the faces of those in the images were not blurred. Is it not indecent to show the faces of those tortured and to reveal their identities to the world? And is the focus on respect more heavily weighed toward the viewers' emotions and sensitivity than to the subjects' sufferings?

Another part of this discussion that caught my attention was that there have been no photographs shown of dead or dying American soldiers. Based off of what Reinhardt stated about the "exotic" status of some of the dead Iraqis, it would seem that there is a social hierarchy in media, showing viewers that the most respect is granted to those nearest to us (Americans, and probably westerner's in general), and that as we get further away from our home, and into this "exotic" land, the people there are not as important and do not deserve our respect, so we will therefore have no qualms about showing straight photographs of Middle Easterners lying dead in a ditch (at this point, it seems that it would not matter the side that the dead were fighting for, but the fact that they are part of this misunderstood, exotic place, that they can be exploited openly). In this argument, it seems that the photographs sort of become unimportant. If the media is already determining what we as the public will find horrifying or gruesome and unacceptable to show on the nightly news, then does it matter what the images show? The photographs are not the ones giving us our emotional reactions at this point, it is the stories that we are told, the words that we hear, and the mental images we concoct.

So what happens when we do focus on the photographs and specifically what they show to us? Benjamin says that aesthetics show even the worst poverty as an object of enjoyment and spectacle. I completely disagree. Maybe it's because I'm a photographer and understand the formal qualities of an image and how they work into the aesthetic (that if the formality of an image is terrible, there will be hardly any aesthetic because the two go hand in hand), but I feel that if an image is aesthetically pleasing, I will be even more focused on the subject and the action taking place within the photograph. I will not be busy worrying about how I cannot see what his happening in the shadows because of poorly thought out lighting and I will not be anxious over the fingers and toes cut off on the framing. If it is aesthetically pleasing, my senses will be at a happy subconscious equilibrium, leaving the rest of my conscious thought to analyze and break down the subject's predicament/suffering. Again, maybe this is because I am a photographer and know of these formal qualities, but this was difficult for me to read because it seems that if people can look at a photograph of a starved, dying, skeletal man crawling across a dirt ground and only think "Look at how the framing lets you see into the distance and how the diffused lighting really softens up the look of the image, and how the man's limbs create great leading lines, etc", then we have lost faith in humanity. I guess I am slightly lost in how this debate can even arise, that aesthetics can diffuse how somebody views suffering. But, this is just how I have responded to reading this article of Reinhardt's, and we'll now move forward.

Reinhardt does bring up a few more examples of images by James Nachtwey and Sebastiao Salgado, as well as a few other photographers, and begins to sort of counteract what he had been talking about in relation to Benjamin's claim of the aesthetic. Reinhardt poses the fact that there can be an acknowledgment of the aesthetic qualities, but that they don't rid the image of its meaning. That with aestheticism in an image, the technical aspect is removed and the viewer is then focused on their sensibility toward the image. Or maybe that it's not dealing with the aesthetic at all, but the fact that it is a photograph. That it is a document of something that really happened (or according to Azoulay, is currently happening). Reinhardt then mentions Sontag's views in "On Photography" and how there may come to be a monotony in viewing so many images of pain and suffering. To this, Allan Sekula suggests that we use text to break this routine way of viewing a photograph and moving onward with our lives. Sekula believes that by adding text, we may be able to view these photographs more so as a documentation and be taken a step back from the absorption of the images, read the text, and then create a relation to what we have read with what we see. Alfredo Jaar attempts to do just that with his "The Eyes of Gutete Emerita" where he displays a minute and a half of text, and then just a flash of an image. His intentions are to get people to stand in front of the piece longer, to really let it sink in, and to be intrigued by the quick flash of the image. Potentially, this may be a way to break that "pornography" of viewing images, but this almost seems to me to be less about the image and less about photography as it is about the creation of mental imagery and a connection to a story (i.e. journalism, not photography). However, having not seen the exhibition of this piece in person, I cannot make a claim to how this piece verifies itself.

The next part that Reinhardt delves into is the aesthetic in relation to two photographs about September 11, 2001. The first photograph is from Joel Meyerowitz, depicting the clean up efforts at Ground Zero (though showing no people) and showing it in such a way with the dust and smoke rising up into the bright sky with almost a painterly effect. The second photograph is one by Thomas Ruff, who, although he did not take the photograph, appropriated an image of the burning twin towers, then blew the image up to quite a large size and increased the size of the pixels as well. Reinhardt's argument dealing with the aesthetic here is that because of the pleasing aesthetic in Meyerowitz's image, it doesn't make the viewer think. It doesn't bring about this revelation of pain and suffering that he believes one would get out of viewing Ruff's image. Here, he believes that the image demands attention and illudes to people being in the buildings currently, suffering and burning, and that as a viewer we would have a stronger response to this image that would not be considered aesthetic, with its elephant sized pixels. Though I can see where he's coming from, I would have to disagree yet again. Maybe if one is looking at these images without any prior knowledge of 9/11, they may see the images this way, unaware that Meyerowitz's photograph shows hundreds of uncovered bodies, some dead, some alive, and that Ruff's image would appear as a real-time photograph of people being burned in these smoking buildings. But in a comparison of the two photographs and with prior knowledge taken into account, I feel that Meyerowitz's photograph of the smoking Ground Zero may bring about the same, if not more, response in relation to the suffering of those people knowing that thousands of tons of metal and concrete (being shown hosed down) are burying 2500 people.

The last part of viewing photographs that Reinhardt talks about is the acknowledgment. He says that when viewing images of people, there needs to be a call for acknowledgment. This would mean that there doesn't have to be an explanation of the image and what is going on, but that the subject is showing the viewer what his happening, and through this connection between the subject and viewer, there is acknowledgment. Without this acknowledgment, without this call for relation between the subject and audience, the image has failed. If there is no connection reaching out to the viewer, there is a lack of the meaning of the image coming through in the understanding of the photograph by the viewer. This, in essence, is what Azoulay looks for in photographs.

This essay by Azoulay is a prerequisite to last week's reading on The Civil Contract of Photography, and is a more upfront, simplified "starter" to what she delves into in The Civil Contract. Azoulay starts out by saying that when a photograph is taken (and here she is talking mostly of Gillian Laub's photographs), the attention to detail and objects and framing within the image create this acknowledgment between the subject and viewer. That with these little clues of the subject's life, we can relate in some way or another, and we can get to know the subject through the interaction between these details, and through the interaction between the subject and the photographer (how the picture was taken. This can be seen in a lot of Zwelethu Mthethwa's work and Fazal Sheikh's work, shown below). With this understanding that we are all a part of the human condition, and that we all suffer and want to reach out to somebody and share with them what we are feeling, we begin to realize and relate to each other in ways different than those bounded by our social/geographical/religious rulings. When we break "sides" and show that we are all human, this connection is made even stronger and the borders of the photographs seem to dissolve until we are standing next to this person and understanding their pain. This is acknowledgment that Reinhardt was talking about, but Azoulay takes it that step further to look past the photograph as an object and to view the people just as that: people.

I really enjoy Azoulay's understanding of the human condition and the way we should look at photographs to acknowledge and watch the people within them in a neutral ground, especially in comparison to the way Reinhardt views acknowledgment in the more simple terms of a recognition, or a fleeting response. In the diagram below, I have attempted to visualize how these two analyze the ways in which viewers come to acknowledge the subject of a photograph.

Zwelethu Mthethwa:

Fazal Sheikh:

 ...with...

*I'd like to apologize for 1) how opinionated I feel this blog post was. The Reinhardt article made me quite frustrated. and 2) some of my ideas where not fully expressed. I took notes as I read and then went back to search the document for some of the key words, but the Reinhardt document didn't recognize the pdf as having text and I was not able to find some of the points in the article to help articulate my discussion. Sorry guys!

Sontag and Azoulay

 The excerpts of Susan Sontag in Regarding The Pain of Others and Ariella Azoulay in The Civil Contract of Photography both take on drastically different views that what we have just read about in regard to Fried and his views on photography. Briefly, both of these women are more focused on what Fried would call the "theatrical" quality of the images, or what the viewer is supposed to take away from the photographs. To both Sontag and Azoulay, these responses are part of what make the photographs real which shows a harsh contrast to Fried's desire for anti-theatrical, aesthetic images.

Susan Sontag had previously written a series of essays entitled On Photography which she wrote in 1977 and came forward with the issue of photography showing traumatic events and gruesome happenings. Sontag believed then that photographs such as these, that we see constantly streaming through the news, ultimately numb us to their horrors and we are unable to look at them with the same emotions and disbelief as we originally had. However, 25 years later, she publishes a book entitled Regarding The Pain of Others where she basically discredits her previous views. In the excerpt that we read, Sontag revisits how we see photographs and why we have the reactions we do.

Though she says we cannot group the entirety of humankind based on one social group, she does find that there is a problem with the way those in "cushy" lifestyles view news photographs. Here she says that these people live in a "society of spectacle [where] each situation has to be turned into a spectacle to be real (interesting) to us." The example she uses are celebrities, and how they work for an image (not reality) and that the media then represents these images as reality. Basically, Sontag tries to show us how skewed our perceptions of reality are...at least for those of us who are not worried about our houses being blown up everyday and shell casings landing in our front yards.  Now that more people have more access than ever to images that show traumatic events, it may seem that this super saturation of images would (like she previously wrote) callous us to their impact. However, to this point, Sontag says now that it's not that people are responding less, but that they just don't like the feelings that are brought up when viewing the images, and choose to look away or change the channel, or put down the paper/magazine. They choose to view the created realities of where Britney Spears went shopping yesterday and what she bought at the grocery store and what her children are wearing and if she put on makeup or not. Images like this don't make people feel uncomfortable. They don't invoke thought or response; they allow people to see this as "reality" and accept it, and move on with their day.

I believe, as does Sontag, that viewing images that show actual reality (events that I don't even have the ability to fully understand or conceptualize) are so important for everybody, especially the comfortable, cushy social classes, to view and experience. Images like this show us what human beings are capable of. They show us what we may not want to see, but what we must see. They are not there to make us feel more or to take on the suffering (although the victims will sometimes want this), they are to inform us, to make us question, to make us think, to make is realize, to make us respond (very much what Fried would consider theatricality). Once we realize the full scope of what human beings are capable of doing, we will have reached what Sontag refers to as full moral and psychological adulthood. At this point, we can no longer claim naiveness, or innocence. We are aware, and even if we choose to turn off our televisions, we still know.

One quote that caught my attention in Sontag's writing, was where she said "If we could do something about what the images show, we might not care as much about these issues." My first reaction was to wholeheartedly disagree, because I felt that by being able to help, we'd invest part of our conscience into helping and in doing so, become even more attached to the issue at hand. However, when I stopped to think about it, I realized that if they were problems that we could simply view, help, and be done with, they would be out of our mind as a situation that was once not okay, but now it's okay and we don't have to think about it anymore. It was a simple bump in life and now everything is good. Because these horrendous issues are 9 times out of 10 things that we cannot do anything about, we must then live knowing that these atrocities will continue as we eat our warm meals at night, take our hot showers, and climb under our soft, down comforters, able to sleep soundly without machine guns ringing outside our doorsteps. With these issues always at hand, we are not calloused by them, but even more so affected by their presence and semi-conscious nagging throughout the day. These are things that we cannot do anything about, and that we don't understand; things that we don't get; things that we will never know. These horrors that come to us through photographs are not part of our experience, but they do stick with us in memories. They are what is real.

One problem that Sontag brought up in dealing with the viewing of the images, is just that: how and where they are viewed. In an art gallery, where it is the norm for photographs to be shown, there is an air of a social event. People come with their families, look at the photographs, then go out to lunch and a movie, and maybe some ice cream. Sure, maybe they were struck by some of the images, maybe they were upset by some of them, maybe they questioned the events a little bit, but it was not an individual, reflective experience. They came with their children. It was an afternoon activity. They didn't sit down in front of each photograph and really let themselves get lost in the questions that it may arise. These photographs were hung in a gallery. They are art. And they will be viewed as art. Sontag offers that magazines and books may be more proper ways to view photographs, as one can sit in the privacy of their own home and spend as much time as they'd like looking at each photograph. However, there are a few problems which you would run into here:

1. There are advertisements in most every magazine, and these advertisements are sometimes using a photograph and paired up right next to one of the traumatic photographs, so as we're looking at dying children suffering from malnutrition in Africa, we also are seeing how beautiful and soft Jergens can make our skin. The photograph sort of loses its impact.
2. One always ends up closing the book/magazine. No matter how long they spend looking at the images, the book gets closed up and put away. That's not to say that the impact of viewing the events isn't still with us, but it will fade as we go back to our daily routine in which we do not experience anything even mildly close to what the people in the photographs are going through simultaneously.
3. By viewing the images, we are simply just viewing them. We are not really experiencing the events. We cannot understand what is truly going on. However, the point is also made that even if we were in the war zone, we would still be just a spectator, viewing bombs go off in front of us and people dying beside us. Though it would have greater of an impact upon us, we are always just viewing unless we are directly involved in the conflict, and at that point, photographs of the event in which we are involved become arbitrary because they cannot show fully the extent of what has been experienced.

There will always be these slight discrepancies. Regardless, Ariella Azoulay believes that we can still draw plenty of understanding from these photographs.

Azoulay does mention Sontag a few times in this excerpt, and starts out by referencing Sontag's On Photography, saying that photographs cannot become exhaustive because there will always be somewhat of a mystery between the subject and the photographer (I will go into more detail about this in a minute). Azoulay begins by telling us about her childhood and how she experienced a bombing when she was young, and how a lot of the images she has in her head are not from actual photographs, but from events which she experienced and then created these mental images, or from things that her mother would say (usually regarding Arabs), which she would create images for in her mind. She believes that there are two types of these mental images:

1. The mental image was ingrained because of an obvious traumatic event.
2. The mental image was ingrained without the person even realizing it at the time, but will later be discovered in some corner of the mind, complete with its trauma and impact.

In these ways, memories (or mental images) are the strongest form of imagery. In looking at a photograph, one is forced to see exactly what the photographer framed, and the vantage point at which they framed it. One is forced to watch (I will also explain watch vs. see further on) this person at this specific moment the photograph was snapped, and all of these factors may bias the photograph and cause it to be seen one way or another. However, with mental imagery, the images were impacted without a third party in between the event and the viewer (the one whose mind the images are impacted in). There is no dictation of framing or vantage point or lighting, etc. There is the event how it happened and that is that.

Briefly, Azoulay touches on advertisement in slight contrast to Sontag. Where Sontag says that advertisements show a comparison of both the image of the advertisement and the images showing reality, Azoulay says that there is not even a comparison. That the advertisement photograph is nothing but a picture. It does not invite the viewer to think about it or study it. It is not even close to the same "medium" as an actual photograph. Azoulay's view of photographs is that one needs to view the image and understand what it is, to question its details and to become immersed in its mystery. She sees no point in looking at a photograph's aesthetic. In this point, I am almost tempted to agree, which came as quite a surprise for me. Previously, I had the idea that if you were to take two photographs of the same object/person, one photograph being aesthetically pleasing and the other more of the snapshot variety, that I would lose complete interest in the non aesthetic image because there would be small missing pieces of the aesthetic qualities that have been pushed on me for 2 years now going to school as a photographer. I felt that maybe the inattention to cropping and framing would keep catching my eye more so than the actual subject matter of the image. Azoulay has called on me to rethink this. Although I still think that photographs need to be taken with some sort of knowledge of what is aesthetically pleasing, I feel that now I will look at photographs more in the realm of "what is actually going on in this image" versus how good of a photographer the person was who took the image. This changed way of viewing photographs will obviously be determinate on the subject matter of the image. If it is an image of flowers or food or some unimportant moment in time, like a fountain going off, I will still be looking for the aesthetics first because I know that in taking photographs like this, the aesthetic is really all there is. If the image is of some sort of important event or a portrait or something not so flat (like flowers), I will probably now look at it with different eyes. And these eyes, Azoulay believes, need to look at these photographs (she talks of photographs of people only from this point on) and not just see the people in them, but watch these people.

One should not see these photographs as documentation of the person having been there, but watching them as they are still standing there. In seeing the photographs in the latter way, there is less of a chance of immoral views. We cannot then break down the photograph as a historical documentation, but as a real time happening, and therefore must apply our immediate morals to the image because it is, in a way, happening right now.

Azoulay calls on the viewer to look at the issues in the photographs through the looks, gazes, and actions of those in the photographs, and to see the subjects as people, as human beings, not as a designated "enemy" or race, class, gender, or religion. She states that we are all citizens of the world of photography, and deems this "The Civil Contract of Photography." The Civil Contract of Photography is meant to break nations' boundaries which threaten to break apart the citizens, and to place all the aspects of photography and the creation of the photograph (the camera, the photographer, the subject, and the viewer) into a neutrally "governed" area: photography. When viewing a photograph, we become part of this community. It is common knowledge that nothing here is written in stone, and that we all know what to expect and what we need to do in viewing the photographs. It is not a place of prejudices and separating subjects into what is right and wrong, good and bad, but to view them as people and to try to better understand their situations. We need to approach the photograph and its meaning as an unintentional effect of the encounter between the camera, photographer, subject, and viewer. In doing so, one will be able to continuously break apart a photograph, finding new things that add meaning and depth to the image and the humanity of the person in the image (this goes back to how Azoulay said there is no way a photograph can become exhaustive because there is always more to discover).

Focusing greatly on the actual subject of the images, Azoulay sets up a discussion of the intentions of the photographed. The subject has agreed to be photographed as they were, and in doing so, they are sending a message to all viewers about their situation. This brings up a slur of questions. Is the subject looking through the photograph to me? Is the subject looking through the photograph to anybody willing to view it? Is the subject aware that anybody will even see this photograph? Does the subject want me to understand their situation, or just experience it through the watching of the photograph? Is the subject calling on me/the viewer to respond and take action? Though the answers may never be quite clear, there are some images that are more straightforward. Azoulay describes the image of the rioter holding the broken lock of his store after paratroopers broke in to stop the protesting (Photo 1). He has chosen to be photographed. He is "posing" for the photograph in holding out the broken lock. In his choosing to be photographed, he has taken control of the situation. He is voicing his situation and not just accepting defeat of what happened. The immediacy of this man's gaze is calling on the viewer to take action and to respond, which contrasts Sontag's idea that we cannot do anything to help this situation. However, maybe it is not that we are called on to help, but that we are called on to understand that this has happened, that this is happening, and that this will happen again. In The Civil Contract of Photography, its citizens call forth the viewers to see them as they are and to gain some understanding of what they are going through. These photographic citizens are governed only by the viewer and the photographic community (not their native government), and they do not bring with them status, ownership, practices, or their institutions. They come as equals and call out to be seen as the individuals that they are.

Photo 1 - Anat Saragusti, Hebron 1982

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.