Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before Hardcover – December 1, 2008

At a very young age in 1963 Michael Fried became an art critic and until about 1970 he was (in my opinion, along with Clement Greenberg) America's most perceptive, intellectually powerful and consistently interesting writer about contemporary painting and sculpture. What made Fried's work special is his astonishing ability to describe what he sees in such a way that works of art are revealed as making compelling ontological claims on the beholder - claims that exist only in their art-historical context. Fried's best essays during the 1960s consist almost entirely of detailed descriptions of particular works - by Pollack, Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, Frank Stella, Anthony Caro and Larry Poons. The miracle is that something close to pure description somehow ends up gathering the force of a philosophical argument, stated in visual terms. This phase of Fried's career culminated in his 1967 polemic "Art and Objecthood", in which Fried pretty much staked something like his professional identity on the claim that the High Modernist work he favored represented not only the future, but the ONLY possible future for serious artistic activity. The history played a nasty trick on Fried: The theatrical aesthetic of Minimalism, recast as "post-modernism", completely displaced modernism as the historical present. Fried's career as a working art critic seemed to be over almost as abruptly as it started.Although Fried denies that his subsequent leap into art history (tracing the history of the anti-theatrical impulse from about 1750 in France to Manet and the "Generation of 1863") has any strong connection with his previous work as a critic, the book on photography suggests that this denial ought not to be taken at face value. One can read this book as Fried's triumphant return to art criticism in light of what seems to be a re-birth of the anti-theatrical impulse in the work of the contemporary photographers discussed. Fried's intellect and personality are too powerful to have simply accepted the proposition that "Art and Objecthood" was just "wrong" about history, and Why Photography Matters suggests how Fried's earliest intuitions remain relevant today.Personally, I believe that "Art and Objecthood" was a bit of a mistake - not because Fried's theory was wrong, but because it's a theory. In Fried's hand, the art work itself provides the theory in a way that is much more powerful than anything that can be argued in the form of a polemic. So I am gratified to see Fried back at work describing what he sees and allowing the rest of us to see it for the first time as it ought to be seen.

Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before Wondering why photography mattered as art as never before, I acquired this hefty hardback. One might argue that a flick-through technique, to view the nice pictures and surrounding commentary (Fried often included interview snippets), is the more enjoyable way to appreciate the author's somewhat dry and disjointed study. This book will likely not satiate if you are looking for a logical and substantive windup of the title's allegation.

Whilst I agree with other reviewers that Fried's writing style isn't always clear, economical or particularly well structured at times, the author presents many bold and original ideas that, frankly, we don't see enough of (i.e. there's a lot of "highly polished" pieces that are well structured, etc., but do present ideas of equivalent depth). And let us remember that some of the views Fried presents include ideas that are not easy to express.In particular, Fried's philosophical (Hiedeggerian) approach to Jeff Wall is a compelling read.Well recommended.

I'm adding my review because I feel there aren't enough low-star reviews here to save people their money. This book needs a good editor. The author seems to think that transcribing a possibly imaginary lecture makes for good reading. It began to seem like every second paragraph contained a reference to what he's going to say later in the book. Long descriptions, literal descriptions, of the content of a photograph which is printed right there for me to see, is quite tedious. References to classical philosophers seem to be there only to indicate to the reader that the author knows of them. Hoping that the section on a famous Magnum photographer that changed his style to be 'art' would be something I could relate to left me to understand that he made his prints really big. His sometimes extensive parenthetical remarks about photographers he knows or met should be reserved for his memoirs, which, after reading this book, I would have no interest in reading. As to answering the title (Why photography matters ...), I found not much in this book.

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Un testo affascinante che riflette sugli sviluppi della fotografia internazionale degli ultimi trent'anni in modo aperto e problematico, offrendo un contributo decisivo all'odierno dibattito sulle immagini