After reading Fried’s introduction to “Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before”, my understanding of what contemporary photography was truly about finally started take hold.

The first, and one of the most discussed ideas in the reading, was the idea of photography, in a tableau-like form, be made specifically ‘for the wall’, as mentioned by Jean-Francois Chevrier. Thomas Ruff, Jean-Marc Bustamante and Jeff Wall especially were used as an example on many occasions, as this idea of large-scale “table-sized” prints seemed to be one of the most important trends mentioned by Fried, as the ideas of theatricality, ‘fascination and absorption’ play deeply into the success of these images.

His first example was one of my favorite photographers, Hiroshi Sugimoto, and his long-exposure stills of empty movie theatres playing through an entire film, resulting in a blank, white screen illuminating the rest of the theatre. While Fried notes that Sugimoto’s stills are part of the ‘new era’ of photography, he does also say that they are not in the same line as Wall’s giant illuminated prints, due to their size.

I have only seen Sugimoto’s work in person, a selection of his seascapes: 

Having viewed these images, and not his theatre work, I can better understand what it is Sugimoto is talking about in regards to how his work is perceived. These images force the viewer to lose themselves, not necessarily in the size (they couldn’t have been much larger than 8×10), but in scope, as there is no focal point with which to focus on, every image would be identical if it weren’t for the effects of the weather on the day of shooting (not unlike the theatre images, where the loss-of-self occurs in the white blank screen, only to have the screen’s surroundings pull you back to reality).

Even though Fried does not mention this particular body of work, I feel it runs in the same vein as what Fried was discussing regarding the similarities between Sugimoto’s smaller prints, and the more contemporary use of the tableau form, such as the example used in the reading, Jeff Wall’s ‘Movie Audience’. Although they are quite different in both scale (Fried even goes on to say that Sugimoto’s Dioramas or Movie Theatres, (I’m going to add his seascapes into this) would lose intensity if printed at a larger scale) and how the work is experienced physically, the experience of being ‘drawn in’ or lost in the image is what I understand to be their common link to this era; While size certainly magnifies this effect, it does not seem to be the sole cause of it, either.

I was also very interested in Jean-Marc Bustamante’s work, as this was my first time looking and reading about some of his work. His notion of ‘entre-deux’ or the in-between seemed especially interesting to me. In particular:

“the event [more broadly, the motif] is placed at such a distance, and contained that these images move beyond the context in which they were made, the geographic setting and so on, and engage the viewer in a one-to-one relationship soleley through their physical presence… My aim is to make the viewer become aware of what his or her responsibility in what he or she is looking at.”

I could be misplacing my understanding, but this sounds suspiciously like what Alberro was discussing in last week’s reading, when he states:

“The resurgence of philosophical aesthetics has coincided with a new construction of the spectator. When, for example, prominent contemporary artists claim that “meaning is almost completely unimportant” for their work and that “we don’t need to understand art, we need only to fully experience it,” they place value on affect and experience rather than interpretation and meaning—rather than contextually grounding and understanding the work and its conditions of possibility. This shift from the cognitive to the affective negates some of the most productive intellectual achievements of twentieth-century critical theory, which had attempted to reveal the social construction of subjectivity, even if it was understood as always already provisionally configured.”