ABSTRACT
The causal process of which the photographer is a victim puts almost every detail outside of his control. John Berger's "weak intentionality" thesis, for example, is the contention that photographs originate in a "single constitutive decision" on the part of photographers as to when to capture an image. Michael Fried's interpretation of Camera Lucida should be read in this light. It seeks to draws out those aspects of Barthes's final book that Michael Fried takes to be consonant with his own anti-theatrical commitments. Perhaps the key respect in which they are mistaken concerns the conditions required for a photograph to come into existence. It is standardly assumed that a photograph comes into existence when a light sensitive surface is exposed to light. An alternative response is offered by Walter Benn Michaels, who grants Fried's interpretation, but takes the remarks he alights upon as pointing to a quite different conclusion to the one that Fried himself draws.
