Fried’s efforts to bring Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and Hegel to bear on contemporary photographic practices are, in my view, less convincing. For instance, his effort to associate Wall’s pictures with Heidegger’s notion that the world reveals itself when functional assignments fail or are disturbed (e.g., when the hammer breaks) prompts the question of why such breakdowns are not more evident in Wall’s work. Although Fried suggests that the artist’s “Diagonal Composition” series is about such breakdowns, the neglected sinks and mop buckets of those pictures seem to be more about the loss of an incalculable “liquid intelligence” in a digital age of dry precision—a loss that Wall has written about with laconic brilliance—than about instrumental failure and its revelatory effects. Wall’s mop, one might say, seems closer to William Henry Fox Talbot’s abandoned broom than to Heidegger’s broken hammer.

¶ 8:14 AM