The Two Photography’s

Interesting essay by Paul Graham titled "the Unreasonable Apple" about a quote from Michael Fried’s recent book “Why Photography Matters as Art and Never Before”

Carefully constructing his pictures as provocative often open ended vignettes, instead of just snapping his surroundings”
Michael Fried

Graham’s essay “the Unreasonable Apple”, takes issue with Fried’s seemingly sophomoric malaise in referring to straight photography as that of merely “snapping pictures”. Graham sets out to establish that there is more happening in the work of “straight” photographers than merely “snapping pictures”. He posits the question what is that “something” that happens when photographers like Robert Adams, Stephen Shore, Diane Arbus took their photographs. The essay goes on to lament what Graham sees as the absence of “straight” photography from critical attention and ends with a mandate seeking photographers, writers, dealers, collectors, and curators, to write critically about what that “something” is. How ever noble the intent the essay inadvertently manages to establish a dialectic between what he sees as “straight” photographers and those photographers who make/synthesis their subject matter for the camera thus fracturing the photographic medium into two types of photography. One is a serious business with a practice and processes beyond Fried’s “snapping pictures” a point of Graham’s I strongly agree with. The other photography is made, synthesized, constructed, and easily explained to the buyers, collectors, dealers, and curators as simply stuff set up for the camera to be photographed.

It is Graham’s choice of language that complicates his call to action. His style of writing, and structure hints at the old modes of modernist photography. There are ways to write about photographic practice in constructive and culturally relevant ways without the need to inadvertently or otherwise tear down other practices of photography. Sadly, especially given the context for this essay, Graham’s "the Unreasonable Apple" is not one of them. For that question to be fairly addressed we can be thankful for SFMOMA and their upcoming symposium "Is Photography Over".