ABSTRACT
Stanley Cavell and Ludwig Wittgenstein give a useful analogical model for understanding the grammatical schematism of Michael Fried's explanatory conceptual regime for painterly modernism. Fried's aesthetic responses to the new photographic objects accordingly disclose an essentially analogical relation between the photographs and the high modernist paintings of the 1960s. According to Fried, the hinge-like structure involves "a relation in which, conceptually, the first and third 'moments' precede the second, and thus jointly determine its meaning". Fried's avoidance of any explicit general or generic account of the new kind of photographic object that is his concern in Why Photography Matters is multiply determined. Although Cavell was writing in an era in which photography and cinema were exclusively analog in nature, a parallel point holds of Fried's serial discussions of contemporary photographic work. Cavell's account of cinema involves a parallel dual deployment of the concept of a medium in relation to that of its material basis.
