Noûs 46 (4):709-731 (2012)
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Abstract |
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.
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Keywords | Photography Aesthetics Epistemology Phenomenology |
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DOI | 10.1111/j.1468-0068.2010.00800.x |
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References found in this work BETA
Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts.Kendall L. Walton - 1990 - Harvard University Press.
Picture, Image and Experience: A Philosophical Inquiry.Robert Hopkins - 1998 - Cambridge University Press.
Transparent Pictures: On the Nature of Photographic Realism.Kendall L. Walton - 1984 - Critical Inquiry 11 (2):246-277.
Image and Mind: Film, Philosophy and Cognitive Science.Gregory Currie - 1995 - Cambridge University Press.
View all 11 references / Add more references
Citations of this work BETA
Memory as Triage: Facing Up to the Hard Question of Memory.Nikola Andonovski - 2021 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 12 (2):227-256.
Fictionality and Photography.Richard Woodward - 2016 - Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 74 (3):279-289.
The Real Challenge to Photography (as Communicative Representational Art).Robert Hopkins - 2015 - Journal of the American Philosophical Association 1 (2):329-348.
The Limits of Photography.Jiri Benovsky - 2014 - International Journal of Philosophical Studies 22 (5):716-733.
View all 20 citations / Add more citations
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