Michael Fried, Photography and Los Angeles

Molesworth describes Michael Fried and his works. The virtual impossibility of forming a useful historical and esthetic framework for evaluating photographs has not prevented Michael Fried from publishing two impressive books about photography within the last four years, in which he develops a theory to explain the importance of the medium and its historical force. Not only has Fried dared to narrativize a history of the contemporary visual arts, he has based it on his own earlier master terms, absorption and theatricality. Among other things, Molesworth discusses the two principles in the high art oil painting tradition.