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In his monumental book, Why Photography Matters As Art As Never Before, Michael Fried locates a key turning point in a ‘protracted moment between 1978 and 1981’ when three artists in different parts of the world—Jeff Wall in Vancouver, Thomas Ruff in Germany and Jean-Marc Bustamante in France and Spain—all started to produce photographs that constituted a ‘new regime in art photography’, one that Fried follows Jean-François Chevrier in designating as the ‘tableau-form’. The determining factor with this new regime is that this is photography that from its very inception is intended for exhibition, designed to be placed on the gallery wall. This is a crucial development because this new condition needs to be understood as creating the form of the work. It is as if—and Fried does allude to this in passing—there occurs with photography at this time what Walter Benjamin famously theorised as the work of art moving from having a ‘cult value’ to an ‘exhibition value’. Yet the peculiarity here, and this is different to how Benjamin originally conceived it, is that this affects the form of photography itself.
With the rise of exhibition value, rather than the invisibility associated with cult value, it is the visible that matters; all must be revealed and given-to-be-seen. It is this that conditions the form of the new regime of art photography. Fried, again following Chevrier, highlights several key factors involved in this transformation. The change in size is the most evident, with photographers producing large-scale works that would be framed and displayed as if in the manner of the ‘tableau’ of paintings. From this change in size, two other key elements followed. First, a change in relation to... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline