Why Photography Matters as Much as Never Before

Fried, Michael

ISBN 10: 0300136846 / ISBN 13: 9780300136845

Published by Yale University Press, 2008

About this Item

First Edition. 12 x 8.5 inches, 409 pp. b/w and color photographic illustrations throughout. Green cloth lettered in white at spine. Photographic jacket. Some creasing along crown of spine, light edge-wear. Fine in Near Fine dust jacket. In mylar wrapper.

Seller Inventory # 4755

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Why Photography Matters as Much as Never Before
• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Publication Date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0300136846
• ISBN 13: 9780300136845
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: Fine
• Dust Jacket Condition: Near Fine

About this title

Synopsis

A renowned critic and historian offers a radically new account of the meaning of ambitious art photography since the Bechers

From the late 1970s onward, serious art photography began to be made at large scale and for the wall. Michael Fried argues that this immediately compelled photographers to grapple with issues centering on the relationship between the photograph and the viewer standing before it that until then had been the province only of painting. Fried further demonstrates that certain philosophically deep problems—associated with notions of  theatricality, literalness, and objecthood, and touching on the role of original intention in artistic production, first discussed in his contro­versial essay “Art and Objecthood” (1967)—have come to the fore once again in recent photography. This means that the photo­graphic “ghetto” no longer exists; instead photography is at the cutting edge of contemporary art as never before.

Among the photographers and video-makers whose work receives serious attention in this powerfully argued book are Jeff Wall, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Cindy Sherman, Thomas Struth, Thomas Ruff, Andreas Gursky, Luc Delahaye, Rineke Dijkstra, Patrick Faigenbaum, Roland Fischer, Thomas Demand, Candida Höfer, Beat Streuli, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno, James Welling, and Bernd and Hilla Becher. Future discussions of the new art photography will have no choice but to take a stand for or against Fried’s conclusions.   

About the Author

Michael Fried is J.R. Herbert Boone Professor of Humanities and the History of Art at The Johns Hopkins University.