Photography and causation: Responding to Scruton's scepticism

British Journal of Aesthetics 49 (4):327-340 (2009)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

According to Roger Scruton, it is not possible for photographs to be representational art. Most responses to Scruton’s scepticism are versions of the claim that Scruton disregards the extent to which intentionality features in photography; but these cannot force him to give up his notion of the ideal photograph. My approach is to argue that Scruton has misconstrued the role of causation in his discussion of photography. I claim that although Scruton insists that the ideal photograph is defined by its ‘merely causal’ provenance, in fact he fails to take the causal provenance of photographs seriously enough. To replace Scruton’s notion of the ideal photograph, I offer a substantive account of the causal provenance of photographs, centred on the distinctive role of ‘the photographic event’. I conclude that, with a proper understanding of the photographic process, we have good reason to re-open the question of photography as a representational art.

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 90,593

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Analytics

Added to PP
2009-09-23

Downloads
289 (#64,063)

6 months
15 (#111,863)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Author's Profile

Citations of this work

Photographic Registers Are Latent Images.Mark Windsor - 2023 - Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 81 (3):404-407.
What's So New about the “New” Theory of Photography?Diarmuid Costello - 2017 - Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 75 (4):439-452.
Depiction and Imagination.Jiri Benovsky - 2016 - SATS 17 (1):61-80.

View all 19 citations / Add more citations

References found in this work

No references found.

Add more references