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 fullest realization of Frydlender's intentions is the large (roughly 5-by-11-foot) panorama of 2005, Shirat Hayam ("End of Occupation?" Series #2), which purports to show the departure of 20 Israeli families from coastal land in Gaza that is to be returned to Palestinian control. From an elevated viewpoint, not quite a bird's-eye but commanding enough, we survey a gleaming beach, an orderly ring of soldiers or police, some settlers ambling to and fro, a handful of photographers (a self-referential touch), some insubstantial-looking shelters, and the placid blue of sea and sky meeting at the horizon. According to the catalogue, the Hebrew title is a reference to the deliverance of the Israelites from Pharaoh's army, and that seems key to explaining the panorama's visual grandeur. But the scale of history painting (or Cecil B. DeMille) starts to seem rather extravagant for what is so plainly an uneventful event. One looks in vain for an act of resistance, for something approaching even the melodrama of Wall's An Eviction (1088), a work that becomes a sort of comparison manque once you read in the catalogue that the Israeli army used force to dislodge the settlers after the cameras were gone.

The constructedness of Shirat Hayam may be read in many clues: shadows are inconsistent; the same trio of women appears twice on the beach. But Frydlender seems intent on supplemental disclosure, judging not only by the catalogue's revelations but also by his participation in a recurring feature of New York magazine called "The Annotated Artwork." As Frydlender stipulated to the magazine when it featured his panorama:

I made this [Shirat Hayam] out of about 50 images taken over the span of an hour from the top of a watchtower. We were there for three days--the second day, the army left the watchtower and we took over.... It took two months on the computer to complete. The credibility of the image as witness is damaged. What we're calling a photograph is not a photograph. I didn't take the picture--I constructed it. (8)

Shirat Hayam is neither a self-reflexive exercise in photographic sleight of hand nor an application of cinematic effects for the aggrandizement of photography. Frydlender regards the constructed picture as an image-equivalent of the actual (which is to say fraudulent) historical episode, an episode he describes as having been staged by the Israeli government, right down to the signs in English furnished for foreign cameras to record.

A very different reckoning of photography's role in delivering the truth is offered by Clinton Fein, who repurposed photographic appropriation to make a series of works based on the pictures of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib that came to public attention in April 2004. A South African-born, San Francisco-based First Amendment activist, (9) Fein hired models to reenact the notorious compositions (detainees piled in a human pyramid, forced to simulate fellatio, handcuffed to beds and bars in extreme positions), illuminated the tableaux vivants with penumbral and strangely intimate lighting, and displayed the enlarged pictures as high-quality chromogenic prints mounted on panel. (The originals and the reenactments can be compared at www.clintonfein.com.)