Rules of Engagement: with photographic truthfulness no longer taken on faith, some photographers are working out a new set of protocols for making pictures that are seriously real

Art in America, June-July, 2008 by Marcia E. Vetrocq

The belief that a higher purpose can be served by abandoning straightforward appearances, in photography as in painting, is central to Peter Galassi's discussion of Dead Troops Talk in the catalogue for Wall's 2007 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art:

Staged over many months in a large rented studio in the vicinity of Vancouver, the picture plausibly could have been made in one shot. In pursuit of the utmost realism, however, Wall photographed the figures individually and in small groups, and patched in their wounds from separate shots of clinically accurate maquettes. (5)

Galassi may sound downright post-ironic when he discounts the single shot in favor of the "utmost realism" afforded by a collage, a fabrication. But flaunting a lie precisely to expose the cracks in the truth has long been regarded as one option in a progressive photographic practice that pursues honesty without nostalgia for a lost ideal. Martha Rosler, for example, invoked the politically engaged photomontages of Dada and Constructivism when she asserted:

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If we want to call up hopeful or positive uses of manipulated images, we must choose images in which manipulation is itself apparent, and not just as a form of artistic reflexivity but as a way to make a larger point about the truth value of photographs and the illusionistic elements in the surface of (and even the definition of) 'reality.' (6)

The works of Barry Frydlender, Clinton Fein and Thomas Demand may be seen as efforts to fulfill Rosler's prescription for photographic staging and manipulation that aims not to dramatize ad nauseam the scandals and betrayals of the medium but to engage the more pressing question of how what we (can) know depends on what we (can) see. With Frydlender, the subject of a small survey at MOMA last year, the backstory is especially piquant: an Israeli photojournalist who had an epiphany about his own complicity in "manufacturing" news during the first Palestinian intifada, Frydlender abandoned photography in 1989, returning after a five-year hiatus only when "he recognized that computer composites could acknowledge their own artificiality--their inherent deceit--by incorporating evidence of the passage of time and thus of the process that produced them." (7)

The photographs at MOMA amounted to a survey of daily life in Israel, the "daily" in that country comprising experiences both urgent and casual, from a police raid and a peace demonstration to a nearly 10-foot-wide view of a well-stocked convenience store whose tightly packed rows of colorful merchandise harbor a mischievous allusion to Andreas Gursky's own digitally enriched retail mural, 99 Cent (1999). Constructing compositions that aspire to the aforementioned condition of "utmost realism," Frydlender seems no less conscious of art history than is Wall. The flaneurs of Manet and Sunday strollers of Seurat have been reborn as the black-suited Orthodox men and boys in shirtsleeves who enjoy a holiday outing in Blessing (2005). Cezanne's card players haunt the small square tables in the friezelike Jaber Coffee Shop (2003), an East Jerusalem cafe where Palestinian men scrutinize the hands they've been dealt in a hushed, backlit ambient worthy of Caillebotte.