Chapter 5 revolves around the description and analysis of three photographic projects by Thomas Struth between 1989 and 2004. Micheal Fried dissects them in chronological order although this order seems to be a heightened way of concluding with the more successful latest body Audience. Fried's main argument in this chapter is about the relationship between the spectators in Struth's photographs and the setting they are in. The first body discusses the relationship to the audience of paintings and how the spectators exist in a different "world" than the paintings they are viewing. The second discusses the way Struth's Pergamon Museum photographs are staged and what that means to the audience and how that affects the way the work was reviewed critically. And lastly Struth's Audience photographs are spoken as a mix of the successful working parts of the two previous bodies of work.
The first project which Fried refers to as the "classic museum photographs" are large format color photographs of spectators, generally from behind, viewing famous paintings. Fried begins the section by noting that commentators often say that Struth is trying to put the audience on the same level as the subject within the paintings. Fried quotes art historian Hans Belting saying that we look at painting and photography with different eyes however when faced with looking at both in Struth's photographs the separate eyes are transformed into a way of looking at photography the same way we view painting. Fried continues by saying that most reviews of the museum photographs have centered around the idea that Struth is intertwining photography and painting and that looking at Struth's images you are engaging in a revealing of the lack of boundaries between the two mediums. Of course Fried is in disagreement with the critique he chooses to exemplify. Belting's reading is the opposite of Fried's. Fried believes that Struth has deliberately left inside the frame certain things or people that formally are disconnected from the paintings. Essentially that the photographs do not place the audience of the paintings inside of them. Belting states that Kunsthistorisches Museum 3, Vienna, 1989 shows the white haired man having a conversation with the sitter of the painting which is him continuing the idea that Struths work connects the photographs to the paintings.
Fried responds that the sitter within the painting does engage the audience when viewed completely frontally. However Struth has shot the photograph at a very steep angle from the work therefor inversely creating less of a connection of the museum spectator and the sitter in the painting. Fried is trying to explain how the man within the photograph is actually not having a conversation.
Between 1996 and 2001 Struth made work at the Pergamon Museum in Berlin. Fried does not describe the second set within the framework that he uses to read the first set. With the second series Fried is not as interested with the otherness of the spectators in the photographs and the sitters in the paintings. Because these works are all staged by Struth, Fried has a different group of previous critique to help shape this section of the chapter.
The spectators were arranged because general viewers would all have headphones on and would be moving around too quickly for Struth's large format camera to capture well. Fried uses a critique of the Pergamon work by Peter Schjeldahl to help grapple with the topic of how sitters react to staged versus unexpected image making. Schjeldahl writes that self consciousness of being photographed causes the subject to be unnatural and therefore unsuccessful. He also claims to have had this reaction to the work on a purely responsive level before even finding out that they were staged. Another critique of the work calls Struth's images as "Faking". Fried states that the reviewers personal distaste with the work did not go as far as to consider why they disliked the stagedness. "("Where poses are not expected" is the crucial qualification: it is as if, faced with seemingly straight photographs dealing with absorptive themes, viewers unthinkingly crave the seduction of the human subject' expected obliviousness to being beheld.
The third and final set of Struth's images that are looked at are in a series called "Audience". The images were produced in Florance, summer 2004. These images are of spectators facing almost head on to Struth while he stands behind the red rope or barrier that surrounds very large pieces of sculptural work. The photographs do not have the object within them that the audience is looking at.
Fried is essentially saying that someone how Struth has created images that do appear as if the viewer and the sculpture they are viewing have some sort of communicative relationship. Fried attributes this to the shear mass of what they are looking upwards at and also how some of the viewers are addressing the sculpture and some are directly addressing the viewer of the photograph.
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