In focus: Liz Jobey on Michael Fried's rigorous analysis of contemporary art photography | Art and design | guardian.co.uk

In focus: Liz Jobey on Michael Fried's rigorous analysis of contemporary art photography | Art and design | guardian.co.uk: "For anybody interested in the changing nature of photography over the last 30 years, Michael Fried's Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before is an important book. The reputation of its author – one of the leading art historians and critics of the past half-century – is guaranteed to capture the attention of photographers and artists alike. Its size and thoroughness, over 400 well-illustrated pages in a large art-book format, distinguish it from the many volumes of critical theory that contemporary photography has spawned in recent years. And the title unambiguously states that photography matters as art, which settles one long-debated question at a stroke"