History of Photography

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The World of Michael Fried's Antiquity

Brendan Boyle

To cite this article: Brendan Boyle (2012) The World of Michael Fried's Antiquity, History of
Photography, 36:2, 211-224, DOI: 10.1080/03087298.2012.654941

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Published online: 19 Apr 2012.

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My thanks to Hollie Mann, Patrick
Faigenbaum, Susanne Partoll at Atelier
Thomas Struth, Katie Johnson and especially
Graham Smith for expert editorial advice. I
owe a particular debt to Professor Andrew
Szegedy-Maszak, whose close critical
attention vastly improved the essay
throughout.
Email for correspondence:
bpboyle@gmail.com
1 – Michael Fried, Why Photography Matters
as Art as Never Before, New Haven: Yale
University Press 2008. Hereafter, all italics
are Fried’s.
2 – Struth’s Pergamon Series was published
as Pergamon Museum 1/2/3/4/5/6, Munich:
Schirmer/Mosel 2004. The catalogue is
unpaginated. Faigenbaum’s photographs of
Roman imperial busts were published as Vies
Parallèles, Rome: Villa Medicis 1987.
3 – See, for example, the remarkable: Richard
Neer, The Emergence of the Classical Style in
Greek Sculpture, Chicago: University of
Chicago Press 2010; especially the remarks
on the beholder in the ‘Introduction’ and the
discussion of thauma idesthai in Chapter 2.
See also James Porter, ‘Why Art Has Never
Been Autonomous’, Arethusa, 43:2 (2010),
165–80; and James Porter, The Origins of
Aesthetic Thought in Ancient Greece: Matter,
Sensation, and Experience, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press 2010. Jaś Elsner,
Roman Eyes: Visuality & Subjectivity in Art &
Text, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press 2007; and Jaś Elsner, ‘Reflections on the
‘‘Greek Revolution’’: From Changes in
Viewing to the Transformation of
Subjectivity’, in Rethinking Revolutions
Through Ancient Greece, ed. S. Goldhill and
R. Osborne, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press 2006, 68–95 are also
indispensable.
The World of Michael Fried’s
Antiquity
Brendan Boyle
Antiquity occupies a surprisingly central role in Michael Fried’s account of con-
temporary art photography. More specifically, on Fried’s account, photographs of
antiquity by Thomas Struth and Patrick Faigenbaum stand at the vanguard of
contemporary photographic practice. This essay examines the place of these photo-
graphs in Fried’s work. The essay suggests that close attention to them can illuminate
not only unclear turns in Fried’s otherwise stunning argument, but also our under-
standing of the phenomenology of ‘beholding’ in antiquity, a problem that recent
work in ancient aesthetics has made considerably more philosophically fraught.
Keywords: Michael Fried (1939–), Thomas Struth (1954–), Patrick Faigenbaum
(1954–), antiquity, Diderot, Heidegger
1
The aim of this essay is to examine the role of antiquity in Michael Fried’s Why
Photography Matters as Art as Never Before.1 The essay is offered in sympathetic
counterpoint to Fried’s project, which is the most sustained and challenging inter-
pretation of contemporary photography known to me. This essay’s point of depar-
ture is the surprisingly central role that antiquity – or, more precisely, photographs of
antiquity – plays in his project. This is not so much because Fried devotes a large
number of pages to photographs of antiquity, but rather because the handful of pages
he does devote to such photographs come at critical moments in the book’s overall
argument.
This alone would motivate an interrogation of antiquity’s place in Fried’s
project. But even more significant is the fact that these few pages are marked by a
degree of philosophical opacity not otherwise present in the book. I say that advisedly
and want to reiterate just how fine the project and its exposition are. But my claim in
this paper is that by focusing attention on what I call the world of Fried’s antiquity,
we can illuminate not only the terms of Fried’s argument, but also the reason why
two of the photographers Fried positions at the vanguard of contemporary art
photography – Thomas Struth and Patrick Faigenbaum – themselves enlisted anti-
quity in their attempts to come to grips with modernity’s central philosophical
problems, aesthetic and non-aesthetic alike.2 And this, in turn, might help illuminate
our understanding of the phenomenology of ‘beholding’ in antiquity, a problem that
has recently become considerably more philosophically fraught.3
I begin the essay by giving a short account of Fried’s project in Why Photography.
This will be familiar ground for some. For those unfamiliar with Fried’s work,
however, this short exposition should provide the relevant philosophical context.
But this stage-setting means that I cannot turn to Struth’s and Faigenbaum’s
History of Photography, Volume 36, Number 2, May 2012
Print ISSN 0308-7298; Online ISSN 2150-7295
# 2012 Taylor & Francis
Brendan Boyle

Figure 1. Thomas Struth, Pergamon

Museum 6, 1996. Chromogenic process print.
Copyright Thomas Struth 2012.

Figure 2. Thomas Struth, Pergamon

Museum 4, 2001. Chromogenic process
print. Copyright Thomas Struth 2012.

Figure 3. Thomas Struth, Pergamon

Museum 3, 2001. Chromogenic process
print. Copyright Thomas Struth 2012.

212
 The World of Michael Fried’s Antiquity

Figure 4. Thomas Struth, Pergamon

Museum 2, 2001. Chromogenic process
print. Copyright Thomas Struth 2012.

Figure 5. Thomas Struth, Pergamon

Museum 1, 2001. Chromogenic process
print. Copyright Thomas Struth 2012.

photographs of antiquity for several pages. Before the stage-setting, then, I simply
offer a short account of one photograph by Struth, Pergamon Museum 6 (figure 1).
I will not argue for my account here; nor will I note its difference from Fried’s – that
comes later. Instead I present it here as a kind of interpretive promissory note.
Pergamon Museum 6 sets in relief the historicity of mindedness. By mindedness I
mean something like the ‘normative structure of a form of life’. Modes of aesthetic
intelligibility are a central part of that structure. Pergamon Museum 6, like others in
the series to which it belongs, makes vivid the ‘pastness’ of one mode of intelligibility –
ancient sculpture and monumental architecture – but, at the same time, makes
perspicuous that it is not incomprehensibly past. The photograph gives a sen-
suous cast to the idea this mode of intelligibility, while no longer ours, does not
stand to us – I might say against us – as something wholly alien. The photo-
graph, that is, brings this past mode of intelligibility into the conceptual space of
our aesthetic and philosophical sense-making practices. The two visitors in the
photograph, then, are to be seen as occupying quite a distinct conceptual, sense-
making ‘world’ from that embodied in the Pergamon altar. This is an effect that
their small size, the altar’s massiveness and figurative displacement of the viewers
into the corner of the picture, the contrast in colour between the visitors’ dark

213
Brendan Boyle

clothes and the altar’s vivid white, and the odd cropping of the frame are all
meant to create. These aesthetic effects, however, are the very ones that render
antiquity non-alien, which transform it from brute materiality and thereby bring
it into the conceptual space of our form of life. The burden of the rest of the
essay will be to make good on these claims and, in so doing, to clarify the
philosophical opacity that surrounds antiquity’s appearance in Fried’s project.

2
I turn now from Struth to provide a short account of Fried’s overall project in Why
Photography. This is complicated by the fact that this book revises and extends the
argument he pursued in his earlier studies of French painting. Those studies –
Absorption and Theatricality, Courbet’s Realism, Manet’s Modernism – are themselves
so intricate that I hesitate to summarise them. But here is Fried himself, in Why
Photography, offering a condensed account of those earlier books:
I argue [in those books] that a central current or tradition in French painting
from Jean-Baptiste Greuze’s momentous Salon debut in 1755 to the advent of
Edouard Manet and his generation around 1860 may be understood in terms of
an ongoing effort to make paintings that by one strategy or another appear – in
the first place by depicting personages wholly absorbed in what they are doing,
thinking, and feeling, and in multifigure paintings by binding those personages
together in a single, unified composition – to deny the presence before them of
the beholder, or to put this more affirmatively, to establish the ontological
fiction that the beholder does not exist. Only if this was accomplished could the
actual beholder be stopped and held before the canvas; conversely, the least
sense on the beholder’s part that the depicted personages were acting or, even
worse, posing for the artist (and ultimately for the beholder) was registered as
theatrical in the pejorative sense of the term, and the painting was judged a
failure. With Manet [. . .] that antitheatrical current or tradition reaches the
point of overt crisis; the primordial convention that paintings are made to be
beheld can no longer be denied, even for a little while, and absorption in all its
manifestations gives way to radical ‘facingness’.4 4 – Fried, Why Photography, 40.

Fried’s reinterpretation of the tradition of French painting in the language of

‘absorption’ and ‘theatricality’, language borrowed from Denis Diderot, proved of
enormous philosophical import, for his reinterpretation showed that this tradition
of French painting was itself deeply implicated in what we might call the ‘Kantian
aftermath’ – the set of philosophical problems the Kantian revolution left for
modernity. Robert Pippin has elegantly developed this dimension of Fried’s project,
situating it within the Idealist tradition’s attempt to articulate how collectively
constituted reason-giving practices were the condition of possibility of a free,
authentic human life.5 Fried’s achievement, Pippin argues, was to demonstrate 5 – See Robert Pippin, ‘Authenticity in
that painting’s pursuit of absorptive figures was not a mere matter of taste, or a Painting: Remarks on Michael Fried’s Art
History’, Critical Inquiry, 31 (2005), 575–98;
response to representational problems inherited from a previous generation of
Robert Pippin, ‘What Was Abstract Art?
painting. Absorption and theatricality, rather, belong to this same Idealist crucible. (From the Point of View of Hegel)’, Critical
Just as the achievement of absorptive effects was the only way that paintings could Inquiry, 29 (2002), 1–24; and Robert Pippin,
establish their authenticity, could seem true, and thereby arrest the beholder, so too ‘The Absence of Aesthetics in Hegel’s
Aesthetics’, in The Cambridge Companion to
was the achievement of the right kind of absorptive identification with reason-giving
Hegel and Nineteenth-Century Philosophy,
practices the condition of possibility of a free, authentic human life. ed. Frederick Beiser, Cambridge: Cambridge
This brings us to Why Photography. It does so all too hastily, but I hope the main University Press 2008, 394–418.
lineaments of the argument are clear enough to appreciate the arc of Fried’s project,
an arc that Why Photography extends. Here is Fried summarising the argument of
this book:
The basic idea behind [Why Photography] is simple. Starting in the late 1970s
and 1980s, art photographs began to be made not only at large scale but also – as
the French critic Jean-François Chevrier was the first to point out – for the wall;
this is widely known and no one will contest it. What I want to add is that the
moment this took place [. . .] issues concerning the relationship between the

214

6 – Fried, Why Photography, 2.
7 – Ibid., 115.
8 – Ibid., 115–16.
The World of Michael Fried’s Antiquity
photograph and the viewer standing before it became crucial for photography as
they had never previously been. More precisely, so I want to claim, such
photography immediately inherited the entire problematic of beholding – in
the terms defined in my previous writing, [of absorption and theatricality] –
that had been central [. . .] to the evolution of painting in France from the
middle of the eighteenth century until the advent of Edouard Manet and his
generation around 1860 [. . .]. Put slightly differently, I shall try to show that the
most characteristic productions of [the best contemporary art photography]
belong to a single photographic regime, which is to say to a single complex
structure of themes, concerns, and representational strategies, which on the one
hand represents an epochal development within the history of art photography
and on the other can only be understood if it is viewed in the context of issues of
beholding and of what I think of as the ontology of pictures that were first
theorized by Denis Diderot with respect to stage drama and painting in the late
1750s and 60s.6
I want to make three remarks about this summary. First, it is clear that Why
Photography must be understood within the context of Fried’s earlier studies of
painting. The problematic of beholding is definitive for both, even if, as we will
see, it is subtly altered in his study of photography. Second, there is admittedly no
mention of ‘antiquity’ in the summary, or of Thomas Struth and Patrick
Faigenbaum, the photographers at the centre of this essay. This might cast some
doubt on my suggestion that photographs of antiquity are especially crucial to the
argument of Fried’s book. But let me reiterate that my claim does not turn so much
on the amount of attention Fried gives Struth’s and Faigenbaum’s photographs of
antiquity so much as it turns on their photographs’ appearance at particularly critical
moments in the philosophical argument of the book.
And so, third, I want to note Fried’s talk of the ‘ontology of pictures’ in the final
sentence of the summary above. Fried does not mean this phrase in a way familiar
from contemporary debates in analytic aesthetics. The ‘ontology of pictures’ rather
needs to be understood in the context of that Idealist problematic adumbrated above,
one that Fried understands quite capaciously. His interlocutors are not only Diderot
and Kant, but also Hegel, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Wittgenstein. And the
‘ontology of pictures’ involves not only questions of freedom and authenticity, but
the question of conceptual activity generally. Put succinctly, the problem of contem-
porary art photography, like the problem of eighteenth-century and nineteenth-
century French painting, and of Idealism generally, is the problem of ‘mindedness’.
3
Thomas Struth was born in 1954 and studied with Bernd Becher at the Düsseldorf
Academy. He is best known for his so-called ‘museum photographs’, a project begun
in 1989 and pursued at intervals since. The museum photographs are themselves
divided into three series. The first series – the ‘classic museum photographs’ – is the
most well known. It ‘comprises some twenty-odd large color photographs of people
looking at paintings in museums and churches in Europe and, in a few cases, the
United States’.7 The second series – the ‘Pergamon series’ – comprises just six photo-
graphs, all taken in the Pergamon Museum in Berlin between 1996 and 2001. This
series features photographs of the museum’s patrons looking at its collection of
antiquities. But unlike the first series, which captures ‘actual’ visitors to the museums
and churches, the patrons captured in the Pergamon series were Struth’s friends, and
he positioned them for the photographs. Fried clearly does not think ill of the
Pergamon series, but he does think that its philosophical stakes, compared with the
‘classic-museum’ series, are appreciably diminished. The third series – the ‘Audience’
series – ‘was shot in Florence at the Galleria dell’Accademia in the summer of 2004’.8
This series shows patrons standing before Michelangelo’s David, which is itself not
visible in the photographs. Some patrons look respectfully, others are clearly bored,
distracted or puzzled by the photographer – Struth, who was visible – in their midst.
215
Brendan Boyle

Most of Fried’s attention is given over to the ‘classic museum photographs’, and his
analysis is subtle and rich. It proceeds by way of a contrast with Hans Belting’s reading of
this series, a reading that stresses the way the paintings’ viewers seem to be commu-
nicating, somehow, with the figures in the painting. In one photograph of an older man
looking at a Rembrandt portrait of a young man, for example, Belting speaks of a ‘silent
dialogue’ between the men, who ‘seem to be communicating with each other across the
chasm of historical suprapersonal time [. . .] The person painted and the person photo-
graphed are in the middle of a conversation with each other’.9 Indeed, Belting claims 9 – Ibid., 118. Belting’s essay appears in
that the communication between patrons and depicted figures can be so intense that at Thomas Struth: Museum Photographs,
Munich: Schirmer/Mosel 2005, 119. Quoted
times ‘one no longer knows what is inside the painting and what is in front of it’.10 by Fried, Why Photography, 118.
Fried insists that the paintings simply cannot sustain such an interpretation and 10 – Belting, Museum Photographs, 115,
claims, by contrast: quoted by Fried, Why Photography, 116.

that in the most compelling [. . .] of the museum photographs, the persons

depicted in the paintings and the actual persons who have come to the museum
to interact with those paintings [. . .] far from taking part in a sophisticated
game in which the boundary between painting and photography is continually
breached, belong absolutely to two disparate and uncommunicating realms or,
as I want to call them, ‘worlds’.11 11 – Fried, Why Photography, 119.

This, then, immediately sets Struth’s project within the problematic begun in
Absorption and Theatricality. Just as the tradition of French painting transfixed the
beholder by the ‘representation of figures so deeply absorbed in what they were
doing, thinking and feeling that they appeared unaware of being beheld [and created
the impression] that they inhabited a world of their own’, so too do these museum
photographs succeed by representing the supreme fiction of ‘uncommunicating
worlds’. Struth’s project, says Fried, ‘harmonizes with crucial aspects of the
Diderotian [. . .] ideal’.12 12 – Ibid., 127.
But Fried has one more turn to give to the interpretive screw. For Struth has not
simply photographed absorptive figures – as if doing in photography what Chardin
did in paint (photographing absorbed card-players or draftspersons, for example). He
has set those absorptive figures against a different world, one from which they are
excluded. And this, then, lends the project significance over and above mere ‘harmo-
nizing’ with the Diderotian ideal. Fried suggests that the photographs:
make perspicuous [. . .] an otherwise invisible (and in an important sense
nonexistent) seam forever separating the represented ‘‘worlds’’ of the paintings
they show from the actual world of the spectators, and that it is the work of that
seam (more broadly, it is the ontological work of the photographs) to create the
impression [of] an imaginary moment before the paintings were given over to
beholding.13 13 – Ibid., 122.

And, one paragraph later, this all gets re-described in the following way:
[Struth’s museum photographs] make visible a certain contrast or set of con-
trasts between the world in which we live, perceive and move [. . .] and another,
mechanically depicted world which on the one hand in strictly visual terms
resembles ours extremely closely (albeit imperfectly in many regards: for exam-
ple, photographs are not normally blurred toward their edges, and of course we
see with continuously self-adjusting binocular vision) and on the other is
separate from us or closed to us in fundamental ways. Indeed the crucial
contrast is that between the separateness or closure of the world depicted in
the museum photographs and the structural openness of our actual, lived world
[. . .] this is precisely the contrast that the photographs make striking to us, that
they set in relief.14 14 – Ibid., 123.

Fried’s argument, in passages like this, can be difficult to hold onto. The final
sentences, with their invocations of ‘mak[ing] striking’ and ‘set[ting] in relief’, are
meant to function as an extremely compressed version of a complex argument
Wittgenstein made about the relation between language and the limits of intellig-
ibility. Fried wants to claim that Struth has done aesthetically what Wittgenstein

216

15 – The literature here is vast, but John
McDowell’s Mind and World (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press 1996) is the
classic statement of the ‘unboundedness’ of
the conceptual. See also Jonathan Lear, ‘The
Disappearing We’, in Open Minded: Working
out the Logic of the Soul, Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press 1999, 282–302; and
Terry Pinkard, ‘Inside, Outside, and Forms
of Life: Hegel and Wittgenstein’, which
appeared as ‘ Innen, Auben und Formen des
Lebens’, in Hegels Erbe, ed. Michael Quante
and Christoph Halbig, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp
2004.
16 – Fried, Why Photography, 123.
17 – Ibid.
18 – Stephen Mulhall, ‘A Critical
Commentary’, British Journal of Aesthetics,
51:1 (2011), 95–8.
19 – Fried, Why Photography, 134.
20 – The adjectives ‘stagy’ and ‘deadening’
belong to Schjeldahl. Kimmelman called the
series a ‘failure’. Fried quotes their critical
remarks in Why Photography, 134 and 135,
respectively.
21 – Fried, Why Photography, 134.
The World of Michael Fried’s Antiquity
showed could not be done linguistically – that is, delimit the boundaries of the
conceptual. But this is all very hasty, and one would certainly be forgiven for not
noticing that this was the philosophical problem at issue in these sentences. Worse, the
‘problem’ of the ‘boundaries of the conceptual’ has such a complicated history that
Fried’s glancing encounter with it leaves all the philosophical issues quite obscure, never
mind the matter of whether Fried has described Wittgenstein’s position correctly.15
But more importantly for this essay, it is not clear how Fried wants this hastily
invoked Wittgensteinian argument about the ‘boundaries of the conceptual’ to be
brought into alignment with the ‘Diderotian’ aspects of his analysis of Struth. I do
not claim that Fried’s ‘Diderotian’ and ‘Wittgensteinian’ readings are at odds with
one another, only that he has not fitted them together perspicuously. The
‘Diderotian’ reading, remember, is the one that situates Diderot’s project within
the argumentative arc of Absorption and Theatricality. This reading is what Fried
wanted to establish against Belting, and what we hear in Fried’s talk of the painted
figures in Struth’s photographs belonging to a ‘realm’ absolutely ‘separate’ from and
‘uncommunicating’ with the ‘realm’ of the beholder. The Wittgensteinian account is
the one adumbrated above about language and the limits of the conceptual. Struth’s
photographs ‘make striking for us, set in relief for us’ a ‘certain set of contrasts
between the world in which we live [. . .] and another [. . .] closed to us in funda-
mental way’.16 In so doing, Fried says, ‘the photographs perform a kind of ontolo-
gical work that language as such cannot’.17
I mean no disrespect to Fried by suggesting that this vertiginous stretch of
argument might leave some readers confused. Indeed, as philosophically sophisticated
a reader as Stephen Mulhall has himself expressed some sympathetic reservations
about Fried’s encounter with Heidegger and Wittgenstein, although Mulhall’s com-
ments take Jeff Wall’s photograph After Invisible Man as their point of departure.18
4
Given the tangled richness of this account, it is surprising that Fried mostly leaves all
such talk behind when he takes up Struth’s Pergamon project. He says that the
Pergamon project ‘follow[s] on’ the classic museum photographs but ‘differ[s]’ from
them ‘in several respects’. He mentions two in particular. First, Fried takes Struth, in
the Pergamon project, to be ‘as interested in the monumental scale of the viewing
spaces as in the character of the objects being viewed’. This gives these photographs
an ‘architectural or environmental cast not present in the earlier series’. Second, and
crucially, ‘because there are no paintings in the Pergamon Museum photographs the
whole question of separate worlds never arises’.19
These two observations secured, Fried turns to his own account of the series,
although this account proceeds largely by negation. The Pergamon series has been
quite coolly received, even by critics otherwise enthusiastic about Struth’s work.
Much of the reason for that cool reception, it seems, was Struth’s decision to ‘more
or less position’ the museum’s visitors for the photographs. (Struth took the photo-
graphs on days the museum was closed to the public.) Critics like Michael
Kimmelman and Peter Schjeldahl, otherwise ardent supporters, complained that
Struth’s decision to position the visitors lent the photographs a ‘stagy’ quality which
proved ‘deadening’ and made the series a ‘failure’.20
Fried brilliantly disarms such criticisms by noting that it is by no means obvious
why ‘staging’ absorption should count, necessarily, as a failure. Indeed, such staging
might be one of the only resources contemporary art photography has at its disposal to
create absorptive tableaux. But even after Fried has rescued the series from its detractors,
it is still curiously isolated in the context of the book as a whole. Fried merely says that the
series represents the ‘visitors’ contemplation – their absorbed beholding – of the
monuments around them’ and that he, Fried, ‘need hardly underscore the Diderotian
implications of such a mise-en-scène’.21 But as we saw above, the ‘philosophical’ ques-
tions Struth’s work animates are not limited to the ‘Diderotian’. The Diderotian was just
217
Brendan Boyle

one aspect of a much more complex ‘Idealist’ problematic, one Fried here inflected in a
Wittgensteinian direction. But no such philosophical terrain is canvassed in his account
of the Pergamon series. Fried short-circuits philosophical discussion by declaring,
straightaway, that ‘because there are no paintings in the Pergamon Museum photo-
graphs the whole question of separate worlds never arises’.
Fried does not explain why that question of ‘separate worlds’ never arises,
although he does seem committed to the claim that it does not. He ends the chapter
by reaffirming that there is ‘no equivalent in sculpture or in the photography of
sculpture to the effects of closure I have associated with paintings’. He does, however,
add an important caveat in parentheses: ‘but see the discussion of Patrick
Faigenbaum’s photographs of marble busts of Roman emperors’, an aside that
seems to moderate the claim just offered.22 22 – Ibid., 142.
All this leaves the argument in a curious position. In the first place, it makes Struth’s
Pergamon series deeply discontinuous with the classic museum series. The Diderotian
and Wittgensteinian questions, which Fried pursued so vigorously in connection with
the first series, have all but disappeared in the second. This seems odd, although certainly
not impossible. I say the questions have ‘all but’ disappeared because Fried also said that
the Pergamon series was so clearly implicated in the problematic of beholding that he
need not ‘underscore the Diderotian implications of such a mise-en-scène’. This seems to
tug the Pergamon series back toward the classic museum series, and toward its philo-
sophical cruxes. And the final parenthesis about Patrick Faigenbaum seems to moderate
still further Fried’s extremely abrupt dismissal of the possibility that photographs with-
out paintings (photographs, that is, of sculpture and monumental architecture) are
implicated in this sophisticated philosophical problematic.
What then, are we to do with Struth’s Pergamon series? And, by extension, with
the entirety of Struth’s project? I do not think that Fried’s argument, despite its
philosophical richness, has a clear and comprehensible answer to these questions. In
the remainder of this essay I attempt to offer such an answer, one that takes its
bearings from Fried’s account but develops and clarifies it, and, most importantly,
shows itself more sensitive to the photographs themselves.

5
We can begin by drawing out the ‘Diderotian implications’ of Struth’s mise-en-scène,
implications that Fried leaves mostly unremarked. His only observation on the
matter comes in endorsing Wolf-Dieter Heilmeyer’s apt remark that none of the
visitors ‘makes eye-contact with the camera, and Struth remains, so to speak, a
clandestine presence within the elevated viewpoint’.23 This is correct as a description 23 – Ibid., 134.
of Struth’s practice, but does not, I think, adequately capture just how implicated is
the series in the absorptive, Diderotian tradition. That tradition is perhaps most
vividly to be seen in the work with which this essay began, Pergamon Museum 6. The
point of view is not only elevated but also oblique. (Indeed, the point of view calls to
mind Struth’s photograph of Vermeer’s Woman with a Lute, although the scale is
quite different.) This sets the two museum visitors apart from the viewer, in the
extreme bottom-left corner of the picture frame, a dislocation reinforced by the
massiveness of the altar in front of and above them. That distance between the
visitors and the photograph’s viewers is reinforced still further by the position of
their bodies, which, although actually turned slightly toward the camera, in no way
present themselves to it. As viewers we feel as if we are almost looking at them from
behind. (An effect put to tremendous use in Jeff Wall’s Adrian Walker.)
Some of these same Diderotian ‘implications’ are to be seen in each of the series’
photographs, although perhaps not as prominently as in Pergamon Museum 6. The
other photographs are more – sometimes much more – extensively populated and
the figures in them are disposed in the museum’s large viewing spaces. This has the
effect of dissipating some of the absorptive intensity so powerfully concentrated in
Pergamon Museum 6. But none of the central figures in these other photographs

218

24 – We can say still more about the
absorptive effects of the series if we compare
its six members to the fifty-seven other
photographs Struth took – but did not use –
for the series. (They are included in the
unpaginated catalogue publication cited in
note 2 above.) Fried does not discuss any of
them, but I think it is quite clear why they fail
to achieve the absorptive effects that the six
actually selected do. I will return to one
especially significant feature of the unused
prints in the essay’s final sections.
25 – Fried, Why Photography, 129.
The World of Michael Fried’s Antiquity
presents herself to the viewer, and Fried is quite right to describe them as ‘absorbed’ in
contemplative viewing. Take, for example, the woman in a light-coloured top and tan
slacks who stands with her back almost directly to the camera in Pergamon Museum 4
(figure 2). Her pose belongs explicitly to the absorptive arc that Fried has traced.
Indeed, Struth’s disposition of the twenty-four visitors is actually quite sophisticated,
since every one of them, no matter where she is located in the frame, refuses the camera
access – with the possible exception of the man in eyeglasses with the coat slung over his
shoulder. His focus, however, is so intense that he manages to shut out the camera
despite in some sense presenting himself to it. The same holds for Pergamon Museum 3
(figure 3). Even though quite a number of visitors are to be seen, the central figures –
that same woman in tan slacks, the suited man with his hands behind his back to the
immediate left of the column base – are disposed in a way that lends the entire
composition absorptive intensity. I take this to be true, even though not every figure
is a model of quiet focus. Indeed, the gated-off mosaic at the right of the frame
neatly thematises the regime of exclusion governing the work of the photograph, an
effect that Struth also deployed in Pergamon Museum 2 (figure 4).24
Fried is notably reticent about these absorptive effects. To be sure, he never
doubted that the Pergamon series belonged to the Diderotian arc of Absorption and
Theatricality. He said, remember, that the ‘Diderotian implications’ were so clear
that they need not be spelled out. But at the same time he insisted that ‘the whole
question of separate worlds never arises’ because ‘there are no paintings in the
Pergamon Museum photographs’. And yet it was just that fact – the fact that the
viewers and paintings, in the classic museum photographs, occupied separate
worlds – that allowed Fried to say that Struth’s photographs ‘harmonize with crucial
aspects of the Diderotian ideal’. If the Pergamon series belongs to that Diderotian
arc, then, it does so quite oddly, quite deficiently. The series belongs to the arc in so
far as the photographs seem deliberately crafted to stage a kind of absorption and
because the photographer himself remained a ‘clandestine presence’. But it does not
belong to that arc in so far as the question of ‘separate worlds’ does not arise. And this
is to say nothing of the other philosophical problem at work in the classic museum
series – the Wittgensteinian project of ‘setting in relief’ a certain set of contrasts. That
arises here not at all, but, again, for reasons that are not entirely clear.
All this confusion, however, is the work of one crucial statement: ‘because there
are no paintings in the Pergamon Museum photographs the whole question of
separate worlds never arises’. This was the sentence that short-circuited any philo-
sophical examination of the Pergamon series, and it also turns out to be the sentence
that lends a level of opacity to all Fried’s discussions of Struth. I cannot emphasise
enough that Fried’s argument, up until this point, has in no way prepared the reader
for this claim. There has been no discussion of the way different media (painting,
sculpture) appear in photographic depiction. Indeed, a few pages earlier Fried had
called Struth’s San Zaccaria, Venice one of the ‘finest’ in the classic museum series.25
This photograph features both painted and architectural elements, although I con-
cede that the former are much more prominent. Still, Fried has no difficulty
incorporating mention of the architectural elements depicted in the photograph
into his analysis, a fact that might suggest that his discussion of the objects at the
Pergamon Museum would proceed in roughly the same manner.
But his discussion proves puzzlingly, arbitrarily discontinuous with all that has
come before, much to Fried’s discredit. It does, however, present an opportunity to
clarify the philosophical stakes of Struth’s project, and, what is more, to clarify the
terms of Fried’s philosophical inheritance, particularly his relationship to the Idealist
problem of mindedness.
6
What, then, does Fried mean by ‘separate worlds’? We can begin by taking the phrase
in a relatively straightforward manner, as a compressed way of expressing Fried’s
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Brendan Boyle

response to Belting: the artefacts and the visitors are represented as inhabiting different
spaces and communicating not at all with one another. On such a reading, the visitors
beholding the frieze in Pergamon Museum 6 occupy an emphatically separate world
from the sculpture, and the photograph wants to make this separateness clear through
its oblique angle, the massiveness of the altar relative to the viewers, and the contrast in
colour. I would say much the same about all the photographs in the series, despite the
fact that in Pergamon Museum 1 (figure 5), for example, visitors are shown ‘inhabiting’
the world of antiquity – by sitting on the steps of the altar, say. There is simply never
any confusion about what ‘belongs’ to antiquity, and what to the visitors. So if Fried’s
language of ‘separate worlds’ is to be understood with the accent on the first term –
separate – then surely the Pergamon series fits that description.
But I imagine that Fried wants the accent to fall on the second member of the
pair – ‘world’. When he claims that the whole question of ‘separate worlds’ never
arises, he does not mean to deny the distinctness of the visitors and the sculpture, but
I take it that he means to deny that there is a world established by the artefacts
photographed. The artefacts may, in other words, be separate from the viewers; but
whatever they are, they do not, individually or collectively, constitute a world.
And so we find ourselves asking just what a world is – or, what a world is for
Michael Fried. This is a complicated question because he uses the term in several
different senses. He frequently means it in a Heideggerian sense, signifying ‘that
wherein a factical Dasein can be said to ‘‘live’’’.26 This sense of the term is an 26 – This formulation comes from Brian
important part of Fried’s reading of Jeff Wall’s After Invisible Man and, to a lesser Blattner’s very fine: Heidegger’s Being and
Time: A Reader’s Guide, New York:
degree, Untangling. In both cases a protagonist’s absorptive stance somehow dis- Continuum 2006, 43.
closes a ‘world’ – a realm of practical engagement – in all its ‘stupefying profuseness.’
(Whether the invocation of Heidegger is correct here is, again, another matter). At
other times the word carries no Heideggerian weight, and instead signifies an
artwork’s ‘unified, internally coherent, autonomous system[s] of creation’, a
description I borrow from Fried himself.27 Of those created objects that have 27 – Michael Fried, ‘An Introduction to My
achieved such internal, autonomous coherence, we can speak of their ‘world’. Art Criticism’, in Art and Objecthood: Essays
and Reviews, Chicago: University of Chicago
I think Fried has this second sense of the term in mind in the chapter on Struth. Press 1998, 48.
But it is not clear why, in this sense of the term, the Pergamon artefacts fail to
establish a world. It cannot simply be because they are sculpture and pieces of
monumental architecture. Fried speaks explicitly of the ‘world’ of Anthony Caro’s
sculptures.28 But the Pergamon artefacts are obviously not autonomous, unified 28 – See Fried, ‘An Introduction’, 62; and
pieces in the way Caro’s sculptures are. Indeed, they are frequently not even wholly also Fried, ‘Two Sculptures by Anthony
Caro’ and ‘Anthony Caro’s Table
intact. A great number of the artefacts on view in Struth’s photographs are fragmen- Sculptures’ – the last two also available in Art
tary, isolated, and incomplete – two columns from a portico, parts of a frieze, capitals and Objecthood.
without a column or base. And sometimes a single photograph will contain a
menagerie of such fragmentary objects (Pergamon Museum 3, for example). So it is
likely for this reason that Fried withholds the distinction ‘world’ from the Pergamon
artefacts and insists that the whole question of separate worlds does not arise.

7
But Struth’s interest is not ultimately in these antiquities themselves. Had it been, I
think the photographs would have been shot at a much closer range. Indeed, I believe
the interpretative key to Struth’s project is to recognise that individual artefacts are of
virtually no significance. What the series attempts to make vivid is the structure of
intelligibility that is collectively embodied in the Pergamon antiquities. Put slightly
differently, the world from which the visitors are separated is not the antiquities,
taken individually, but the totality of antiquity itself. To my mind this is the
impression most forcefully conveyed by the Pergamon photographs. Far beyond
the absorptive effects secured by the staging and the ‘clandestine presence of the
photographer’ is the feeling that the antiquities embody a mode of intelligibility and
sense-making that are radically, almost entirely, foreign to the visitors and, in turn,
the viewers of Struth’s photographs. The Pergamon museum’s artefacts – even

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 The World of Michael Fried’s Antiquity

though they are somewhat disparate, chronologically – belong to a form of life whose
sense-making practices are so distant from us that they might well be said to
constitute their own, separate ‘world’. I do not mean that sculpture as such is no
longer practised. Rather, I mean that Struth’s photographs make vivid the pastness of
this mode of artistic activity. The photographs set in relief that sculpture and
monumental architecture can no longer do for us or be for us what they once did
and were. There is, then, a world in these photographs – but it is a world of
‘intelligibility’. And that world is most certainly closed to us.
Understood in this way, the Pergamon series continues the Diderotian trajectory
of Struth’s museum project quite exactly. It is not only because the photographer is
positioned as a ‘clandestine presence’ that it merits the Diderotian description. It
merits the description because the series, like the classic museum photographs,
captures two separate, almost wholly uncommunicating worlds – one, the world of
intelligibility of the viewers; the other, the world of intelligibility of ancient sculpture
and monumental architecture.
It is important to say that these worlds are only almost wholly uncommunicat-
ing. It is not as if the viewers are standing before something utterly foreign, some-
thing of which no sense whatsoever can be made. Indeed, I take it to be quite
important to the series that its central photograph, Pergamon Museum 1, shows, in
the far right of the depicted space, a visitor speaking with a museum employee who is
dressed in what looks to be a laboratory coat, presumably because he has been
involved in the reconstruction of part of the Pergamon altar. He looks to be
explaining something about the altar – or its reconstruction – to the viewers and,
in so doing, thematises exactly the intelligibility of antiquity’s pastness.
That same photograph likewise includes a not-yet-finished area of the altar. (It is
covered in a blue tarpaulin. Presumably museum staff were still at work on it.) Struth
took quite a number of shots without including the tarpaulin, and I find it striking
that the photograph he selected for the series does include it – if not prominently,
then certainly unmistakably. I understand its inclusion in the way suggested in the
previous paragraph – that is, that although antiquity’s modes of intelligibility are
past, they are not incomprehensibly past. We can bring our sense-making practices to
bear on them, can make them perspicuous.
Both Fried and I, then, claim that the photographs set something in relief, but
what that something is differs. He claims that the photographs:
make visible a certain contrast [. . .] between the world in which we live, perceive,
and move [. . .] and another, mechanically depicted world which on the one
hand [. . .] resembles ours extremely closely [. . .] and on the other is separate
29 – Fried, Why Photography, 123. from us [. . .].29

I suggest that the contrast is one of historical intelligibility. The reasons for
preferring the latter are complex, and a full analysis would take us into deep philoso-
phical waters. But let me note, first, that on Fried’s reading Struth’s photographs do ‘a
kind of ontological work that language as such cannot’. This sounds like an attractive
position, but is not, for Idealist reasons, a sustainable one. There just is not any work
that language cannot do. If it cannot be done in language, it cannot be done.
Second, and more importantly, Fried has not made it clear what specific features
of the photographs do such ‘ontological work’. And, ultimately, the photographs
themselves must adjudicate the dispute. Fried follows the remarks just cited with a
paragraph about the difference between the surfaces of oil paintings and of photo-
graphs, but I cannot see how those remarks seal the ‘ontological’ point. My reading,
by contrast, is everywhere borne out by the photographs themselves. In each of the
six photographs we are presented with a sensuous rendering of an encounter with a
mode of intelligibility that we recognise as having once been – but no longer being –
our own. That mode of intelligibility invites our close, absorptive examination, and
Struth’s photographs capture that solicitation. But there is never any suggestion that
the historical distance in intelligibility will be bridged. This past mode of

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Brendan Boyle

intelligibility will always remain past, but can – with the right sort of sensuous
rendering – be made part of the logos of our sense-making practices.

8
I have attempted to move discussion of Struth’s photographs toward questions of the
historicity of modes of intelligibility. But there are moments in Fried’s text that
themselves suggest as much. This is especially true of Fried’s account of Struth’s
‘Audience’ series. As with the Pergamon series, Fried denies that there is any question
of ‘separate worlds’. But Fried does speak of the profound contrast between the
museum visitors and the unseen sculpture, Michelangelo’s David:
The viewer of the photographs cannot but be aware of the profound contrast
[. . .] between two very different stages of the same ‘civilization,’ the first
associated with the David [. . .] the second that of the international tourists in
their often awkward but invariably respectful attitudes and casual summer
dress.30 30 – Ibid., 142.

Fried does not talk much about the Audience series, but he does seem on the cusp of
saying something quite like what I have said here. And, indeed, my thought is that Fried
has unduly hamstrung his own account by understanding the language of ‘worlds’ too
narrowly. Had he understood it more in the direction of ‘intelligibility’ – a direction
that the ‘stages of civilization’ talk suggests – he might have avoided some of the
infelicitous discontinuities that mar his movement between Struth’s three series.
Those infelicities come to a head when Fried tries to account for why Struth
abandoned efforts to photograph visitors in front of abstract, non-figurative paint-
ing. Fried says that such paintings will not work for Struth’s project because they do
not, ‘for all [their] material reality and formal self-sufficiency [. . .] picture a world’.31 31 – Ibid., 127.
This seems extremely implausible, especially since such material reality and formal
self-sufficiency were just what Fried had said were required to establish a world.
But when we understand the language of a ‘world’ in the historically inflected
manner I have suggested – where ‘world’ means something like the ‘structure of
intelligibility’ – we can offer a much more convincing account of Struth’s decision to
abandon this aspect of the project. For if the goal of the photographs is to set in relief
historically inflected modes of intelligibility, photographs of abstract, non-figurative
painting simply cannot achieve this effect. Not because, as Fried says, such painting
fails to ‘picture a world’, but because the mode of intelligibility sensuously embodied
in such painting is not distinct from our own. That modernist mode of intelligibility
belongs the paintings’ viewers, and to us. There is only one world – ours.

9
Patrick Faigenbaum is a French photographer born in 1954, who is most well known
for what Fried describes as ‘two superb early series of black-and-white photographs
of aristocratic Italian families in their palazzi, the first taken in Venice, Florence, and 32 – Ibid., 215.
Rome in 1983–7 and the second in Naples between 1989 and 1991’.32 Fried is more 33 – The catalogue publication – see note 2
interested in a different series – twenty-six photographs of busts of Roman emperors, above – is extremely rare.
34 – Fried, Why Photography, 216–17.
all housed at the Capitoline Museum. These black-and-white photographs were all Graham Smith strikingly observed to me that
shot ‘at extremely close range’ and ‘concentr[ate] exclusively on the heads and faces, Faigenbaum’s busts call to mind perhaps
with here and there a neck’. Fried reproduces the portraits Augustus, Julius Caesar, most urgently Henry Fox Talbot’s Bust of
Salonine, Caracalla, Gordien III and Titus, all done in 1986.33 Fried is moved by the Patroclus, originally published in The Pencil
of Nature (1884) and available in Larry
photographs and sensitively describes their impact: Schaff’s H. Fox Talbot’s The Pencil of Nature;
Anniversary Facsimile. New York: Hans P.
the cumulative effect of the closeness, cropping, lighting, printing, and so on has Kraus, Jr. Inc. 1989. Fried does not mention
been to infuse the images themselves with a note of human interiority – what I Talbot’s image, but it would be very much
earlier called mindedness – altogether foreign to the imperial bust as an artistic worth asking whether that image lends itself
genre, were one viewing these in their room at the Capitoline rather than to Fried’s talk of photography’s ability to
through the medium of Faigenbaum’s photographs.34 ‘infuse’ sculpture with mindedness.

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35 – Ibid., 218.
36 – Andrew Szegedy-Maszak suggested to
me that there may well be a subtle way of
bringing Faigenbaum’s work into some kind
of alignment with Struth’s. On Szegedy-
Maszak’s reading of Faigenbaum’s busts, we
might imagine that the photographs ‘place
us as viewers’, and perhaps Faigenbaum
himself, in a position analogous to Struth’s
viewers of the Pergamon antiquities. This
strikes me as correct, but still leaves open the
question of the fate of sculpture in
photographic depiction.
Figure 6. Patrick Faigenbaum, Augustus,
1986. Gelatin silver print. Copyright Patrick
Faigenbaum 2012.
The World of Michael Fried’s Antiquity
And as for the significance of Faigenbaum’s work project for the overall argument of
Why Photography, Fried says: ‘Not surprisingly, I want to suggest that Faigenbaum’s
Roman emperors [. . . and] their inspired conjoining of materiality, hence uncon-
sciousness, and expressiveness is implicitly [absorptive]’.35
Fried’s remarks on Faigenbaum make no mention of Struth’s Pergamon series.
Indeed, Fried seems to think that Faigenbaum’s project has more in common with
the portrait work of Rineke Dijkstra, Luc Delahaye, Roland Fischer, and Struth
himself. Faigenbaum is surely a portraitist in some sense, but it seems odd that
Fried does not take the opportunity to revisit his earlier claim that the photographic
depiction of sculpture and painting do not produce analogous effects. In fact, Fried
seems perfectly unbothered by Faigenbaum’s photographed sculptures. The analysis
proceeds almost as if the busts depicted in this series were no different than the
persons depicted in the work of the other portraitists mentioned above. This can
come as quite a surprise to a reader sensitive to – and puzzled by – Fried’s earlier
claims about the Pergamon artefacts. Although I would not go so far as to claim that
Fried’s position here is at odds with his position on the Pergamon artefacts, it seems
clear that Fried has no coherently articulated position on the central matter of the
place of different media in photographic depiction.36
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Brendan Boyle

If, however, we focus our attention on Fried’s remarks about the way the photo-
graphs infuse the busts with a mindedness wholly unavailable to a viewer beholding the
busts in their room at the Capitoline, we can find reason to approach Fried’s discussion
of sculpture in the manner I suggested above. There I claimed that although Struth’s
photographs depict separate worlds of intelligibility, those worlds were not incompre-
hensibly separate. The mode of intelligibility characteristic of the Pergamon artefacts
could be recognised as past but not thereby wholly alien. Sculpture and monumental
architecture are sense-making practices, just not ours. This is what the Pergamon series
makes apparent. Indeed, the Pergamon series might make this perspicuous in a way not
available to the museum visitors themselves. It takes, in other words, the aesthetic
achievement of Struth’s photographs to make this contrast visible.
Something similar is at work in Fried’s remarks about the intelligibility that
photography brings to these busts. Note the way Fried suggests that Faigenbaum’s
series imbues the busts with a ‘mindedness’ not available to someone viewing the
busts in the Capitoline Museum. Photography, that is, can take up the past and its
mode of intelligibility, and in so doing make both part of our own. Indeed, a stronger
claim – one Fried seems to make – is that without some sort of aesthetic representa-
tion, these busts can remain nothing but mere matter. And as mere matter, they can
have no meaning for us. The idea that it takes something like aesthetic work to bring
otherwise alien matter into the world of our sense-making practices is a deeply
mysterious idea – but one with quite a rich Hegelian pedigree.37 37 – I have in mind Hegel’s suggestion that a
portrait is ‘more like the individual than the
10 actual individual himself’ (Hegel, Vorlesung
über Ästhetik. Berlin 1820/1821. Eine
My aim in this essay has been, first, to demonstrate that antiquity plays a surprisingly Nachschrift, ed. Helmut Schneider,
Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang 1995, here
critical role in Fried’s recent work on contemporary photography and, second, that
265– 6). The right way to understand this
close examination of this role can unravel some of Fried’s argument’s tangled richness. point is to situate it alongside Hegel’s
Unravelling that richness has involved inflecting Fried’s account in an historical descriptions of the natural world as geistlos
direction. But I hope to have shown: first, that it better accounts for unclear turns in [mindless]. The natural world is on its own
nothing but brute materiality, ens creatum. It
the argument; second, that it takes its bearing from an implicit but undeveloped
can, however, be made meaningful, be
historical sensibility in Why Photography; and, third, that it best answers to the photo- brought into the space of the conceptual.
graphs themselves. I have offered a comprehensive account of Struth’s project, but I Imperial busts are clearly not part of the
hope to have shown the lineaments of what such an account would look like, and along natural world, but in so far as they embody a
past mode of intelligibility we might think of
what axes it would need to move. It will need to articulate more specifically just what
them as nearly such. They are, that is, nearly
mode of intelligibility is embodied in ancient sculpture and monumental architecture, geistlos until the sensuous work of
and how Struth’s photographs bring that mode into relief. What is more, it will need to photography integrates that intelligibility
articulate how that mode of mindedness became our own. How that is, did the mind- into our sense-making practices. The most
sophisticated account of Hegel’s aesthetics
edness of ancient sculpture become, say, the mindedness of Caro? It is in answering
known to me is Benjamin Rutter, Hegel on
these questions that the resources of recent work in ancient aesthetics – especially, but the Modern Arts, Cambridge: Cambridge
not exclusively, the work mentioned in endnote three – will be invaluable. University Press 2010.
Where does this argument leave Fried’s talk of the ‘ontology of pictures’? In one
sense, quite untouched. Fried’s account is, as I have said, the most philosophically
sustained and compelling treatment of contemporary art photography known to me.
And in so far as Fried’s account attempts to situate such photography within
modernity’s ‘Kantian aftermath’, it is a stunning achievement. And, as I have said,
there is much in Why Photography that is a marvel of philosophical lucidity. But Fried
does stumble when confronted with antiquity and this suggests that there is con-
siderable philosophical work to be done on the history of artistic sense-making
practices and their transformations. Whether that work ought be guided by Fried’s
essentially Idealist sensibility – and just how historical that Idealist sensibility should
be – is a different question. I think it should, and readers will no doubt have
recognised this argument’s Hegelian, and quite historical, colouring. But I think
Struth and Faigenbaum might suggest that anyone – even those unsympathetic to the
Idealist project – who wants to offer a philosophical account of the vanguard of
contemporary art practices might well begin in the halls of the Pergamon or
Capitoline Museums.

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