In this paper, I develop a unified account of cinematic representation as primary depiction. On this account, cinematic representation is a distinctive form of depiction, unique in its capacity to depict temporal properties. I then explore the consequences of this account for the much-contested question of whether cinema is an independent representational art form. I show that it is, and that Scruton’s argument to the contrary relies on an erroneous conception of cinematic representation. CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this?

This volume of specially written essays by leading philosophers offers to set the agenda for the philosophy of depiction.

There is a variety of epistemic roles to which photographs are better suited than non-photographic pictures. Photographs provide more compelling evidence of the existence of the scenes they depict than non-photographic pictures. They are also better sources of information about features of those scenes that are easily overlooked. This chapter examines several different attempts to explain the distinctive epistemic value of photographs, and argues that none is adequate. It then proposes an alternative explanation of their epistemic value. The chapter argues (...) that photographs play the epistemic roles they do because they are typically rich sources of depictively encoded information about the scenes they depict, and reliable depictive representations of those scenes. It then explains why photographs differ from non-photographic pictures in both respects. (shrink)

Most instructors who teach introductory courses in aesthetics or the philosophy of arts use the visual arts as their implicit reference for "art" in general, yet until now there has been no aesthetics anthology specifically orientated to the visual arts. This text stresses conceptual and theoretical issues, first examining the very notion of "the visual arts" and then investigating philosophical questions raised by various forms, from painting, the paradigmatic form, to sculpture, photography, film, dance, kitsch, and other forms on the (...) borders of the visual arts. The selections represent both classical and contemporary views and include sections by artists, art historians, and critics as well as philosophers. A singularly important text for courses in the philosophy of arts or aesthetics, this anthology is designed to enrich the philosophical and critical examination of our beliefs about the visual arts. (shrink)

This paper presents an argument for seeing Marcel Duchamp and Robert Mapplethorpe as opposite ends of a tradition of negotiation of art with its conditions of production. The piece takes seriously Kant's suggestions concerning the fine arts and contests views of art that see the Kantian tradition as formally fixed.

Abstract The Me as a socially constructed self presenting itself, is the subject of new conceptual interest. Discourse analysis is the preferred tool for analysis of the linguistic repertoires that we use to order the experience of our selves. But we also present ourselves visually, with some care. An attempt is made to apply a kind of discourse analysis to self?portraits by eminent photographers. Within the process of portraiture and the rules of the pose, professionals should be able to present (...) their true visions of themselves. Specific dilemmas are likely. While women have been the site of many contradictions in themselves as a sight, men in their images must be prepared to bear the castrating power of ?the look?. It might even be that in some romantic sense, there is the revelation of an authentic, spontaneous self. A set of ten examplars is interpreted, ranging from 1901 to 1986. The photographic evidence for men clearly shows situational self?characteristics in terms of the role of the photographer in the period. Although the women included are comparable in status, using the non?verbal interpretative models of Goffman and Wex, they rather demonstrate signs of the conventional submissive feminine identity. Such an analysis of visual discourse cannot decide on the degree of awareness in the presentations. Further the interpretations are as open to rational contradiction as other forms of discourse analysis. (shrink)

In this essay the visual arts of the machine age morph into literature and theory and then back again to images, gestures, and thought.

The main task of this paper is to understand if and how static images like photographs can represent and/or depict temporal extension (duration). In order to do this, a detour will be necessary to understand some features of the nature of photographic representation and depiction in general. This important detour will enable us to see that photographs (can) have a narrative content, and that the skilled photographer can 'tell a story' in a very clear sense, as well as control and (...) guide the attention of the spectator of the photograph. The understanding and defence of this claim is a secondary aim of this paper, and it will then allow us to provide a good treatment of the particular case of photographic representation and depiction of temporal extension. (shrink)

For the metaphysician, photographs are very puzzling entities indeed. And even from the non-philosopher's intuitive point of view, it is not that clear what sort of thing a photograph is. Typically, if a client wants to purchase a photograph, she can mean very different things by 'buying a photograph' : she can mean to buy a print or a number of prints, or she can mean to buy a negative (when traditional film photographs are concerned) or a file (when digital (...) photography is concerned), or she can mean to buy a right to use a photograph a precisely determined number of times in a number of brochures or on a website, and so on. When facing a new client, I always, without exception, face the problem of explaining to her what it is that she is actually buying – and it is not always clear that she is ever buying a photograph. As a metaphysician, I face a much more difficult challenge : find out to what ontological category photographs belong to. Are they concrete spatio-temporal entities like prints, are they universals since there can be many 'prints-instances' of a same photograph, are they sets or aggregates of prints, or something even different ? This is the task that I wish to undertake in this paper : examine all plausible metaphysical categories to which photographs could belong to, and see which one is the fittest. As we shall see, in this 'survival for the fittest' competition between traditional metaphysical categories, there will be no real winner : several categories will reveal themselves to be enlightening and useful when describing features of what photographs are, but none will prove to be entirely satisfactory. Photographs, it seems, are a sort of borderline entities that share some but not all aspects of several traditional metaphysical categories. Is it then justified to postulate a new ontological category to which photographs would properly belong ? On mainly methodological grounds, I shall argue that it is not, and I will suggest a different way out of this metaphysician's trouble by defending a nihilism about photographs. To put it bluntly, I will defend the claim that photographs do not exist – but I will also argue that this is not a very revisionary or anti-commonsensical claim. (shrink)

In this paper, I explore the nature of photographs by comparing them to hand-made paintings, as well as by comparing traditional film photography with digital photography, and I concentrate on the question of realism. Several different notions can be distinguished here. Are photographs such that they depict the world in a 'realist' or a 'factive' way ? Do they show us the world as it is with accuracy and reliability other types of pictures don't posses ? Do they allow us, (...) as some have suggested, to literally see the world through them ? Below, I will distinguish three kinds of realism about photographs, reject two, and partly endorse one. Indeed, the label "realism", when concerning photographs, can stand for a variety of very different claims. The first (and quite obvious) distinction to start with concerns what the realist thesis is about : the claim that somehow photographs are more accurate or more reliable or that they somehow depict the world better than hand-made pictures can be a claim about the photographic image itself or alternatively a claim about the way in which photographs are produced. In the former case, realism is a thesis about how photographs look and what sort of information they contain, while in the latter case realism is a claim about the process of production of photographs. It is the latter claim that is the most discussed in the philosophical literature about photography. I will concentrate on this type of realism, of which I shall examine two varieties. (shrink)

A new form of visual representation of divine others is emerging: photography. I examine here a set of photos of deities related to an apparition claim. The goal I pursue is to analyze the self-constitutive features of these pictures – how they produce what they claim to be. I argue that the “presence' of the deities in the photos is achieved through “incarnation practices.' But these pictures are not just a factual representation of alleged mystical events. They constitute an update (...) and a variation on the “Grand Christian Narrative' wherein the factual poses the moral problem of belief. In that sense, divine photography does not modify the epistemology of religious belief. (shrink)

Everyone knows a picture is worth a thousand words. But sometimes, especially in journalism, a picture can be worth much, much more. This added value isn't always positive. Pictures can inflict lasting pain on victims of grief and tragedy. This paper by an undergraduate journalism student explores the ethical dilemmas photographers face when capturing such traumatic incidents on film and explores the lack of professional guidelines available to guide them.

Pictures are a quintessential source of aesthetic pleasure. This makes it easy to forget that pictures are epistemically valuable no less than they are aesthetically so. Pictures are representations. As such, they may furnish us with knowledge of the objects they represent. In this paper I aim to account for photography’s possession of greater epistemic utility than handmade pictures. The method I employ is a novel one: I seek to illuminate the epistemic utility of photographs by situating both them and (...) handmade pictures among the sources of knowledge. This method yields an account of photography’s epistemic utility that better connects the issue with related ones in epistemology and which is also relatively superior to other accounts. Moreover, it answers a foundational issue in the epistemology of pictorial representation; that is, “What kinds of knowledge do pictures furnish?” The position I defend is that photographs have greater epistemic utility than handmade pictures because photographs are sources of perceptual knowledge while handmade pictures are sources of testimonial knowledge. (shrink)

The claim that photographs are fictionally incompetent (i.e. that they can only depict those particulars they are appropriately causally related to) is argued by Noël Carroll, Gregory Currie, and Nigel Warburton to be falsified by cinematic works of fiction. In response I firstly argue that it does not follow from cinema's having a capacity for the representation of ficta that photography has a capacity for the representation of ficta. Secondly, and inspired by the work of Roger Scruton, I develop an (...) account of how it is that cinema represents ficta on which this is fundamentally a matter of dramatic/theatrical representation. I argue that in cinematic fiction photography delivers a pre-existent representation of ficta rather than creating or generating fictional content. With this being so, the claim that photography is fictionally incompetent is compatible with cinematic fiction. 1. (shrink)

Many have held that photographs give us a firmer epistemic connection to the world than do other depictive representations. To take just one example, Bazin famously claimed that “The objective nature of photography confers on it a quality of credibility absent from all other picture-making” ([Bazin, 1967], 14). Unfortunately, while the intuition in question is widely shared, it has remained poorly understood. In this paper we propose to explain the special epistemic status of photographs. We take as our starting place (...) (in §1) Kendall Walton’s startling proposal that photographs are special because they are “transparent” [Walton, 1984] — that is, that they are special because, unlike other depictive representations, they enable us literally to see their depicta.1 Walton’s proposal has not convinced many; however, it has proven surprisingly difficult to say just what is wrong about the transparency thesis. In §§2–4 we’ll rise to this challenge and show why photographs are not transparent in Walton’s sense. Finally, in §§5–7 we’ll propose and defend a novel diagnosis of what is epistemically special about photographs. (shrink)

In this essay, author?educator?photographer A.D. Coleman considers a number of dilemmas inherent in photographing private persons in public places. ?Street photography?; is a genre whose ethical dimensions are often overlooked, despite the photographer's efforts to humanize and universalize a moment in time. According to the author, the dilemmas of street photography are imagistic, general, and philosophical, as well as pragmatic, specific, and legislative.

This article contains a survey of recent debates in the philosophy of photography, focusing on aesthetic and epistemic issues in particular. Starting from widespread notions about automatism, causality and realism in the theory of photography, the authors ask whether the prima facie tension between the epistemic and aesthetic embodied in oppositions such as automaticism and agency, causality and intentionality, realism and fictional competence is more than apparent. In this context, the article discusses recent work by Roger Scruton, Dominic Lopes, Kendall (...) Walton, Gregory Currie, Jonathan Cohen and Aaron Meskin, Noël Carroll, and Patrick Maynard in some detail. Specific topics addressed include: aesthetic scepticism, transparency, imagination, perception, information, representation and depiction. (shrink)

This is a book about the nature of film: about the nature of moving images, about the viewer's relation to film, and about the kinds of narrative that film is capable of presenting. It represents a very decisive break with the semiotic and psychoanalytic theories of film which have dominated discussion over the last twenty years. The central thesis is that film is essentially a pictorial medium and that the movement of film images is real rather than illusory. A general (...) theory of pictorial representation is presented, which insists on the realism of pictures and the impossibility of assimilating them to language. It criticises attempts to explain the psychology of film viewing in terms of the viewer's imaginary occupation of a position within the world of film. On the contrary, film viewing is nearly always impersonal. (shrink)

Given that many imaging technologies in biology and medicine are non-optical and generate data that is essentially numerical, it is a striking feature of these technologies that the data generated using them are most frequently displayed in the form of semi-naturalistic, photograph-like images. In this paper, I claim that three factors underlie this: (1) historical preferences, (2) the rhetorical power of images, and (3) the cognitive accessibility of data presented in the form of images. The third of these can be (...) argued to provide an epistemic advantage to images, but I will further argue that this is often misleading and that images can in many cases be less informative than the corresponding mathematical data. (shrink)

This article addresses the portrait as a philosophical form of art. Portraits seek to render the subjective objectively visible. In portraiture two fundamental aims come into conflict: the revelatory aim of faithfulness to the subject, and the creative aim of artistic expression. In the first part of my paper, studying works by Rembrandt, I develop a typology of four different things that can be meant when speaking of an image’s power to show a person: accuracy, testimony of presence, emotional characterization, (...) or revelation of the essential “air” (to use Roland Barthes’ term). In the second half of my paper this typology is applied to examples from painting and photography to explore how the two media might differ. I argue that, despite photography’s alleged ‘realism’ and ‘transparency,’ it allows for artistic portraiture and presents the same basic conflict between portraiture’s two aims, the revelatory and the expressive. (shrink)

The advent of computer-assisted digital manipulation has raised new ethical concerns in news photography. A series of recent questionable manipulations in news magazines gives rise to a call for some systematic decision making and accountability. Protocols rather than codes of ethics are called for.

In 2003, a photograph taken by Richard Prince, Untitled (Cowboy) , sold at auction for $332,300. Some might be surprised that a photograph could garner such a sum, but, in this case at least, none more so than Jim Krantz. Krantz might be allowed a certain level of incredulity, for Prince's photograph was a photograph of another photograph, this one taken by Krantz himself. As far as copyright is concerned, Krantz's photograph and Prince's are the same work, and so Krantz (...) is almost certainly infringing on Prince. Copyright protects ‘authored works’, and not art works per se . And unfortunately, while copyright law assumes some metaphysical basis to its objects, this basis tends to go largely uninvestigated. In this paper, I work to develop a comprehensive, coherent, and consistent account of the ontology of authored works suitable for the purposes of copyright law. (shrink)

What is special about photographs? Traditional photography is, I argue, a system that sustains factive pictorial experience. Photographs sustain pictorial experience: we see things in them. Further, that experience is factive: if suchandsuch is seen in a photograph, then suchandsuch obtained when the photo was taken. More precisely, photographs are designed to sustain factive pictorial experience, and that experience is what we have when, in the photographic system as a whole, everything works as it is supposed to. In this respect (...) photographs differ from handmade pictures, and from other information-preserving tools, such as the readings on a geiger counter. This distinctive feature can be used to explain what is epistemically special about photographs, and also to give an account of the distinctive phenomenology of looking at a photograph rather than a handmade picture. All this provides the background against which to assess claims that digital photography differs from traditional in certain key ways. (shrink)

Many films are made by a two-tier process: the photographing of events which themselves represent the story the film tells. The latter representation is often illusionistic. I explore two consequences. The first concerns what we see in film. I argue that we sometimes see in such films, not events representing the story told, but simply the events composing that story. The way is thereby opened to a unified aesthetic of film, whether made the two-tier way or not. The second consequence (...) is that, since we see these films as photographic, we sometimes experience them as photographic recordings of the events, possibly fictional, that compose the story told. (shrink)

When we look at photographs we literally see the objects that they are of. But seeing photographs as photographs engages aesthetic interests that are not engaged by seeing the objects that they are of. These claims appear incompatible. Sceptics about photography as an art form have endorsed the first claim in order to show that there is no photographic aesthetic. Proponents of photography as an art form have insisted that seeing things in photographs is quite unlike seeing things face-to-face. This (...) paper argues that the claims are compatible. While seeing things in photographs is quite unlike seeing things face-to-face, nevertheless seeing things in photographs is one way of seeing things. The differences between seeing things by means of photographs and by means of the naked eye provide the elements of an account of the aesthetic interests photographs engage. (shrink)

Sociologists, philosophers and historians of science are gradually recognizing the importance of visual representation. This is part of a more general movement away from a theory-centric view of science and towards an interest in practical aspects of observation and experimentation. Rather than treating science as a matter of demonstrating the logical connection between theoretical and empirical statements, an increasing number of investigations are examining how scientists compose and use diagrams, graphs, photographs, micrographs, maps, charts, and related visual displays. This paper (...) focuses on diagrams in biology, and tries to demonstrate how diagrams are an integral part of the production of scientific knowledge. In order to disclose some of the distinctive practical and analytical uses of diagrams, the paper contrasts the way diagrams and photographs are used in biological texts. Both diagrams and photographs are shown to be “constructions” that separately and together mediate the investigation of scientific phenoman. (shrink)

A standard art-ontological position is to construe repeatable artworks as abstract objects that admit multiple concrete instances. Since photographic artworks are putatively repeatable, the ontology of photographic art is by default modelled after standard repeatable-work ontology. I argue, however, that the construal of photographic artworks as abstracta mistakenly ignores photography’s printmaking genealogy, specifically its ontological inheritance. More precisely, I claim that the products of printmaking media (prints) minimally must be construed in a manner consistent with basic print ontology, the most (...) plausible model of which looks decidedly nominalist (what I call the relevant similarity model) and that as such, photographic artworks must be likewise construed, not as abstracta but as individual and distinct concreta. That is, the correct ontological account of photographic art must be one according to which photographic artworks are individual and distinct concrete artworks. In the end, I show that the ontology of photographic art resists the standard repeatable-work model because the putative repeatability of photographic artworks is upon closer inspection nothing more than the relevant similarity relation between individual and distinct photographic prints. (shrink)

As computer technology develops, elements in photographs can more easily be rearranged with undetectable changes, offering broad opportunities to alter the reality depicted in photos. This article looks at some contexts in which photographs have been altered and explores moral complications in determining standards for manipulation that center on a concept of deception and credibility.

The context and caption of a photograph often suggest that the content described is real. When this happens an assertion is made?at least implicitly. Newspapers provide such a context, and viewers naturally understand news photographs assertively. If in such a context, the content described is not real, then the viewer is likely to be deceived. Willful viewer deception is practiced by photographers in a variety of common situations in which it is unjustifiable.

Combining ideas of perceptual psychologists J.J. Gibson and J.E. Cutting, moving on to answer the arguments of the "Naysayers" against autonomous and artistic meaning in photographs.

Joint interview, with Kendall Walton, by Richard West.

Cynthia Freeland’s investigation of four kinds of ‘fidelity’ in portraiture is cut across by more general philosophical concerns. One is about what might be called the expression of persons--the persons or ‘inner selves’ of portrait subjects and of portrait artist: whether either is possible across each of the four kinds of fidelity, and whether these two kinds of expression are in tension. More fundamental is the problem of telling how self-expression is at all possible in any of these forms. Finally, (...) she wonders how photography affects all these questions. This comment addresses portraiture not so much in terms of the four fidelities, but with another quartet of concepts: four ordinary types of ‘display’, in terms of which we see how artists’ self-expression is possible in all these forms, also including photography. Its key idea is that portraits are displays simply by being pictures or sculptures, which are kinds of artifacts, hence things that we perceive as having intentional affordance: that is, as being intentionally made ‘for’ something. (shrink)

Concerns photography and time as duration, sequence, equability, past and present (illus.).

First ever philosophy treatise on photography, analytic in approach but sensitive to photo-history, not confined to aesthetics or art (illus.), Walker Evans photo on cover. Papercover printing, Dec. 2000.

Editor's errata: Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 52.2 (Spring 1994): 167.

Review of literature and independent essay on the 1989 sesquicentennial of photography, winner of Canadian Association for American Studies 1991 award for paper that "best exemplifies the discipline of American Studies".

Photographs furnish evidence. This is true in both formal and informal contexts. The use of photographs as legal evidence goes back to the very earliest days of photography, and they have been used in American trials since around the time of the Civil War. Photographs may also serve as historical evidence (for example, about the Civil War). And they serve in informal contexts as evidence about all sorts of things, such as what we and our loved ones looked like in (...) the past. (shrink)

Andreas Gursky is the darling of philosophers and art theorists of all kinds of traditions and denominations. He has been used as a prime example of the return of the sublime in contemporary art, as a trailblazer in the use of the digital manipulation of images in order to represent something abstract and even as a philosopher of perception who makes some subtle point about the nature of visual experience. All of these arguments are based on some or another technological (...) innovation Gursky uses: the size of his photos, their postproduction (often digital) manipulation and their unusually high resolution. The aim of this paper is to shift the emphasis from these arguments on the significance of the new technology in Gursky’s oeuvre to a much more important role technology plays in his works, namely, in their aesthetics. (shrink)

It has been claimed that photographs are transparent: we see through them; we literally see the photographed object through the photograph. Whether this claim is true depends on the way we conceive of seeing. There has been a controversy about whether localizing the perceived object in one's egocentric space is a necessary feature of seeing, as if it is, then photographs are unlikely to be transparent. I would like to propose and defend another, much weaker, necessary condition for seeing: I (...) argue that it is necessary for seeing that there is at least one way for me to move such that if I were to move this way, my view of the perceived object would change continuously as I move. Since this condition is not satisfied in the case of seeing objects in photographs, photographs are not transparent. (shrink)

Photography is often said to be an essentially causal medium. This paper addresses the role of causality in photography and argues for three main claims: (i) a causal theory of photography does not force us to say that images of backlit objects are photographs of the back surfaces of the said objects (as Roy Sorensen would have it); rather, (ii), such images, I suggest, are photographs of the objects and what Alva Noë would call their ‘looks’; (iii) the notion of (...) ‘looks’ furnishes us with a way to move closer to an answer to the question of the appropriate causal relation in photography. (shrink)