In his section about Rineke Dijkstra, Fried discusses mainly the comparisons and contrast between Dijkstra's imagery and that of Diane Arbus. He emphasizes the moralization famously leveled against Arbus by Susan Sontag, and inquires as to the differential between Arbus and Dijkstra. He notes their similar frank and potentially brutal nature, and their use of full-body imagery and often wide angle lenses to present an inescapable surveillant force.

He notes that contemporary criticism of her work is far less harsh than was the response to Arbus; he does not consider whether this might merely be a function of temporal emergence, of coloration, or of any fundamental sociological differential.



Instead the main contrast he posits is that of subject psychology; since the subjects of Dijkstra's photographs are apparently more comfortable in their own skin, we become more comfortable with their image. But this is not the whole story: as he points out, the subjects are not entirely at ease with the photographic set, and their own unconscious awkwardness is made apparent in the unprepared placement of limbs.

Rineke's subjects are the universal unprepared, as Fried outlines, whether they be immediately post-natal mothers, young soldiers, or children perhaps not yet fully aware of their surroundings in the setting of a beach. He considers how they all share a fixed gaze on the camera, and points to this as an amplification of their inadequate situational unity; superficially, the flash Dijkstra uses isolates the subjects from their background and puts them apart.

Though he does not make the connection, we could easily imagine Sugimoto lurking behind the beach subjects, bringing their lack of exuberance in line with the relative permanence of their environment's procedural progression.

Fried, Michael. Why photography matters as art as never before / Michael Fried. New Haven : Yale University Press, c2008.