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

Fein's counterfeits are not intended to reprise tired debates about originality and authorship. Unlike Sherrie Levine, who rephotographed Walker Evans's Depression-era images, or Thomas Ruff, whose enlargements of Internet images preserve and accentuate the flaws of screen grabs, Fein seized upon despicable amateur images, which unexpectedly had acquired public notoriety and probative value, and re-presented them in enhanced, painterly terms. His invocation of old-master painting, far from summoning up Christian martyrdom as do the Abu Ghraib canvases of Fernando Botero, delivers us to the dark threshold of inhumanity conjured by Goya.

A free speech watchdog, Fein also observed that when the soldiers' snapshots were picked up on the Web and disseminated by establishment news sources, online and in print, the genitals of the nude prisoners were blurred (as genitals are when the news media reproduce garden-variety pornographic images). That concession to good taste, Fein contends, served to downplay the sexual sadism and degradation inherent in the forms of abuse devised for the occasion, qualities he sought to restore to the situations when he pictured them. He further notes that the original hbu Ghraib pictures were themselves staged, with body pyramids topped off and thumbs-up signs flashed with an awareness of the camera's presence and appetite. Curious about the moral proximity between witnessing and instigating, Fein set out to see if he might understand (he says that he did) something of the "mindset" of the abuser by assuming the role of photographer in the reenactment. In the end, and once again in contrast with Botero's canvases, Fein's photographs are about the torturers--the photographers among them--and not about the victims.

Something of Frydlender's determination to expose the processes of photographic contrivance and Fein's determination to reimagine the responsibility of the photographer as a witness came together when two equally uncharacteristic projects by Thomas Demand, Grotto and the "Yellowcake" series, were paired in an exhibition in Venice last summer. For both, Demand departed from his established procedure of selecting a found photograph, eliminating any figures, fabricating a lifesize cardboard-and-paper replica of the mise-en-scene and photographing the model, which is subsequently destroyed. It's an exacting yet melancholy route to a patently processed image, for each generation of representation is at a further remove from some originary truthfulness.

To create the broodingly romantic photograph Grotto (2006), Demand used a hyperdetailed and massively material computer-rendered cardboard model of a cave in Mallorca. The model was spared destruction in order to be exhibited with Demand's photograph and a rambling, garrulous archive (postcards, tourist brochures, travel magazines, geology journals) that is all about caves. With the entire apparatus behind Grotto on view, Demand briefly ceased to grieve over photography's shortcomings and elisions, shoring up the photograph with the physical plenitude of model and documentation, and addressing an audience as if it can handle the problematic truth about pictures.