The Brooklyn Rail

I remember hearing comments about Michael Fried’s book on photography to the effect that it went to too great lengths to remind the reader about the precedents in his earlier writings in relation to the argument being made. I know I can’t be really objective—but it seems to me that the essence of the basic argument is to describe a spark that jumped between his brilliantly impetuous thinking of 1967 and, to begin with at least, my own ambitions. And how that ignited something that required ten plus years to flame up as photography in the mid- to late-1970s. The intricacy of the argument and the sheer unlikeliness of there being a development from “objecthood” to “cinematography” took some getting used to, since nothing remotely like it had been articulated before.

In Exit Interview, he makes this comment:

Going back to my years at Princeton, I became aware that I was completely at home in the presence of abstract painting and sculpture. Put slightly differently, from an early moment abstract art corresponded to some sort of default setting for me. I took to it naturally, without then or ever having to make any inner adjustment to the fact of abstraction. On the contrary, it has always been representation that has seemed to me, not unnatural, that goes too far, but somehow calling for reflection and analysis.…

Abstract art transformed the way we apprehend depictive art; all depictive art since 1910 is made under conditions different from before then. In that same period, photography has taken its place as a major depictive art. It may be that eyes particularly attuned to the criteria imposed on us by abstraction are those that are therefore able to intuit this new condition and to forward it from painting to photography. I think this is where the spark was struck.