Critical Response: What Do We Want Photography to Be? A Response to Michael Fried

Elkins offers a critical response to Michael Fried about recent photography theory. He remarks that Fried's reading will put a stop to some of the looser uses of the punctum, not by demonstrating how strange Camera Lucida is, but by making explicit what is entailed in subscribing to the punctum. Moreover, Fried is right to stress that the detail that strikes as a punctum could not do so had it been intended as such by the photographer precisely because the point is arguable and pulls the punctum out of its solipsistic private-language doldrums.