Sunteți pe pagina 1din 16

EDITED BY

JERROLD
LEVINSON
THE OXFORD HANDBOOK OF
AESTHETICS
Edited by
JERROLD LEVINSON
OXFORD
UNIVERSITY PRESS
OXFORD
UNIVBRSITY PRESS
Great Clarendon Sllttt, Oxford OXl6DP
Oxford University is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University's objective of excellence in scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide in
Oxford New York
Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi
Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi
New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto
With offices in
Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece
Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan South Korea Poland Portugal
Singapore Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam
Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press
in the UK and in certain other countries
Published in the United Stales
by Oxford University Press Inc.. New York
C the contributors, 2003
The moral rights of the author have been
right Oxford UnMrsity Press (maker)
First published Z003
First published in paperback Z005
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press,
or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate
reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction
outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department,
Oxford University Press, at the address above
You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
The Oxford handbook of aestehtics Jedited by Jerrold Levinson.
p.cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
I. Aesthetics-Handbooks, manuals etc. I. Levinson, Jerrold.
BH56 .094 2003 1II'.8S--dCZI 2002038148
ISBN O-19-8z50Z5-8
ISBN O-19-9Z7945-4 (pbk.)
13579108642
Typeset by
Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India
Printed in Great Britain by
Biddies Ltd, King's Lynn, Norfolk
CHAPTER 36
PHOTOGRAPHY
NIGEL WARBURTON
PHOTOGRAPHY is the most widespread form of visual communication using still
images. Since its invention the medium has not changed substantially, or at least not
until the recent invention of digital photography. The uses to which photography
has been put and the conventions surrounding those uses have, however, evolved
significantly.
Those analytic philosophers who have written about still photography have for
the most part focused on quite a narrow range of topics. Their main concern has
been to characterize the nature of the causal link between object photographed and
photographic image. A recent survey of philosophical writing on the aesthetics of
photography (Currie 1 98), for example, concentrated exclusively on the question
of the relation between photography's mechanicity and its alleged transparency to
its objects arising from the optico-chemical causal link between a photograph and
what it is of. Although the unravelling of such matters relates directly to questions
in aesthetics, the questions themselves are questions about the nature of photo-
graphic representation and apply just as much to snapshots and evidential uses of
photography as they do to photographic artworks.
This reluctance of philosophers to descend from general analyses of 'the photo-
graph' to come to grips with questions about photographic art can be explained in
part by the relatively recent invention of photography and also by a past tendency to
disparage the notion of photographic art. Now that most major art collections
include works of photographic art, there are fewer excuses for ignoring photography's
most ambitious employment. True, there are still those who agree with Baudelaire,
who n ~ declared that photography's true duty was 'to be the serv-;;;:rtQf the
PHOTOGRAPHY 615
sciences and arts-but the very humble servant, like printing or shorthand, which
have neither created nor supplemented literarure' (Baudelaire 1859: 113). But most
writers on photography now at least acknowledge that photographic art is possible,
even if, with notable exceptions (such as Snyder and Allen 1975, Batkin 199', and
Savedoff 1999), they have had relatively little to say about particular examples of it.
1. BAZIN AND CAVELL:
AUTOMATIC PICTURES
Much late twentieth-century philosophizing about photography is the direct
descendant of Realist film theory. Andre is a major influence here. In his
short essay 'The Ontology of the Photographic Image' (Bazin 1945) he isolated a
number of subsequent photography theorists have taken up and elab-
orated. He allowed that still photography had achieved many of the aims of
Baroque art by producing likenesses in perspective, but his main claim
;astliat photography had gone much furth;r than this. Photographs are not just
good likenesses in the way that paintings can be: their idiosyncratic causal link with
their subject matter places them in a class.aRart. To convey this idea, Bazin made a
hyperbolic identification of image and object represented:
The photographic image is the object itself, the object freed from the conditions.QULme and
space that govern it. (Bazin 1945: 141- --
Presumably he couldn't have meant that my photograph of Georges Simenon actu-
ally is Simenon. A comment in a later essay, 'Theatre and Cinema: provides a gloss
on this exaggerated account:
Its automatic genesis distinguishes it radically from the other techniques of reproduction.
The photograph proceeds by means of the lens to the taking of a veritable impression in
light-to a mold. As such it carries with it more than mere resemblance, namely a kind of
identity. (Bazin 1951: 96)
In other words, the photograph is different in kind from other forms of pictorial
representation. My photograph of Simenon doesn't just look like him: it is some-
how closer, or more connected, to the man than a drawing or painting
could be, a kind of relic. --
In 'The of the Photographic Image: Bazin clainis that photographs
do not involve significant intentional input and are therefore in some sense ,9bj.ec--
tive. Playing on the fact that in French the lens is called the 'objectif', he writes
of the 'essentially objective character of photography'. On the PartPlayed by the
616 NIGEL WARBURTON
photographer, he comments:
For the first time an image of the world is formed automatically, without the creative inter-
vention of man. The personality of the photographer enters into the proceedings only in his
selectio oLthe..<>bject to be photographed and of the urpose be has in mind.
the final result may reflect something of his ersonality;trus does not play the
same role as is played by that of the painter. (Bazin 1945: 13)
Bazin's take on photography resurfaced in the 1970S in Stanley Ca,YfIl's description
of the medium in his book The World V-e",ed (revised edn 197 ,first published in
1971), a work that focused mainly on moving images. There he claimed that in pho-
tography the mechanical nature of th;process, what he called its 'automatism',
the e.lement from pictorial representation:
Photography overcame subjectivity in a way undreamed of by painting, a way that could not
satisfy painting, one which does not SO much defeat the act of painting as escape it altogether:
by automatism, by removing the human agent from the task of reproduction. (Cavell 1979: 20)
Furthermore, Cavell claimed that all photographs are necessarily of reality in a way
that paintings only rarely are: you can always ask what is behind a building in a
photograph. As he put it, 'We might say: is a world; a photo raph is of
the . orld' (Cavell 1979: 24). --
Both H. Gene Blorker (1977) and Joel Snyder (1983) took issue with the idea that
?"" .,--., -
a painting's world is fundamentally different from that of a photograph. As will
,......
emerge in my discussion below, claims such as Cavell's only if at all, of
a p.ill1kular range of documentary or detective uses of photography-pictor;;:;) or
depictive uses of photography, like paintings, create their own worlds.
The idea that photographs are in some sense and that they are neces-
sarily of the world is found in one of the more controversial philosophical articles
-
on photography, Roger Scruton's 'Photography and Representation' (Scruton 1983;
first published 1981). ThG' 'hicle and Kendall Walton's 'Transparent Pictures'
(Walton 1984) are the and most discussed manifestations of
photography theory in the of Bazin. Scruton and Walton are jointly
responsible for persuading an'!!tic philosophers that there are philoso;mamy
inte;i;sting questions to be asked about the nature of photographic representation.
2. SCRUTON AND HIS CRITICS
S<:!:!!!Q.n claims that photography, at least in its ideal form, is not an_intentional process
but an optico-chemical one. This is consistent with Cavell's account. Paintings present
e--
us with a way of seeing their subjects and embody thoughts about those subjects,
",,--'
PHOTOGRAPHY
617
whereas ideal photographs are merely surrogates for their subjects:
With an ideal photograph it is neither necessary nor even possible that the photographer's
intention should enter as a seriousfact"or in determining how t e picture is seen. It is recog-
-- - nised at once forn-ow something looked. In some sense) looking at a photograph is
a for looking thing itself. (Scruton 1983: 111) --
The subject of a paintin mayor may not erist; that of an ideal photograph neces-
sarily'exmsand looks more or less liKe ille photograph: photographs, because of
thcir optico-chemical origins, are transparent to what they represent. Photographs
. -------- --
are more like mirrors than they are like paintings. The surprising conclusion that
Scruton draws from this characterization of ideal photography is that photography
is not re'presentational. Clearly, photographs are representational in that they stand
in for their objects; but what Scruton means by this claim is that photographs are
to their objects, and so are not themselves of aesthetic interest:
if one finds a photograph beautiful, it is because one finds something beautiful in its sub-
jects. A painting may be beautiful, on the other hand, even when it represents an ugly thing.
(Scruton 1983: 114)
Many readers took this conclusion to be an attack on the idea that there could be
photographic art. Scruton maintained that the medium of photography is 'inher-
ently pornographic', by which he meant that photography provides a substitute for
its objects rather than embodied thoughts about those objects.
Scruton concedes that actual photography may differ from the ideal of photog-
raphy that he describes. Actual photography may involve the photographer exer-
cising control over detail in the photograph, but ortly at the cost of ceasing to be
pure photography: in Scruton's terms, such photography 'pollutes' the medium,
turning it into a kind of painting. He is adamant that only the grossest elements of
style can be achieved with this essentially transparent medium.
Scruton's article, which has been reprinted in several different versions since its
first appearance, has been much criticized (see e.g. Wicks 1989 and King 1992).
It seems to be a form of question::begging to define an ideal of photography that
differs significantly from actual photography, and then to draw conclusions about
the nature of the medium on the basis of it. William King for example, undertook
to show through the consideration of specific examples how an interest in a pho-
tograph need not be an interest in its subject. He concluded that 'some photographs
can be interesting in one way that paintings can be, namely, aesthetically interest-
ing by virtue of the representation' (King 1992: 264). Several years before
Scruton's piece appeared, Joel Snyder and Neil Walsh Allen published a wide-
r--
ranging article which convincin Iy undermined the view that 'print
themselves' and that photographs u ore or less what the eye sees:
The notion that a photograph shows us 'what we would have seen had we been there QUf- '.v
selves' has to be qualified to the point of Aphotograph shows us 'what we would I
618 NIGEL WARBURTON

have seen' at a certain moment in time, pointJb!c kept our head immobile
and eye and ifwe saw things with the equivalent of a Iso-mm or 24-rnm lens and
if we saw things in Agfacolor or in Tri-X developed in D76 and printed on Kodabromide
3 paper. By the time all the conditions are added up the origiD?1 pQsition hAA been reversed:
instead of saying that the camera shows us what our eyes would see, we are now positing the
rather unilluminating proposition that, if our visioll-W()t'ked like photography, then we
would see things the way a camera does. ( nyder and Allen 1975: 15",2)

Snyder and Allen make a convincing case for the photograp.!le"'s role
in photographic picture-making, a case that could be used t6 reply to Scruton's
later critique.
However, there is a to Scruton. This is based on the recogni-
tion that sophisticated photographic commumcation is typically achieved through
creating a repertoire of images within which new meanings are given. Scruton was
wrong to think of photography as styleless, or at best stylistically impoverished:
individual style in photography is not achieved solely by within
----- single images (see Warburton 1996). Hence, even if it were true that individual pho-
tographic images were styleless because of the photographer's lack of control over
detail, it would not follow that the medium was essentially styleless.
3. WALTON AND HIS CRITICS
Snyder and Allen are undoubtedly correct that photographs don't show us precisely
what our eyes would have seen. Yet there is a widespread temptation to treat look-
ing at photo raphs as a of 109king at thin\s. For example, when you
100 at Bill Brandtt"portrait photograph of the painter Francis Bacon on Primrose
Hill, it can be tempting to say that you can see Francis Bacon. At least, the experi-
ence of looking at a photograph of someone feels more like actually looking
at them than does the typical experience of looking at a portrait painting. Many
writers on photography have commented on this experience. Roland Barthes
describes it in his Camera Lucida:
One day, quite some time ago, I happened on a photograpb of Napoleon's youngest brother,
Jerome, taken in 1852. And I realized then. with an amazement I have not been able to lessen
since: 'I am looking at eyes that looked at the Emperor.' (Barthes 1984: 3)
- - ---------
Patrick Maynard, in his dialogue on the subject of photography 'The Secular leon',
gave an explanation of the sense of immediacy that photographs can give:
If there's a bright window opposite a wall and you hold a magnifying glass near the wall
you'll be able to see a little image of the window (or what is outside it) on the wall. And by
PHOTOGRAPHY 619
seeing this image you indirectly see what is outside. As you know, a camera is just a device
for fixing such images. So by seeing the photograph you indirectly see what it depicts. We
see actual things by means of photography. (Maynard 1983: 160).
Kendall Walton developed iliis idea. arguing iliat the causal chain from object to
photograph allows us literally to see through photographs to ilieir objects:
with the assistance of the camera, we can see not only around corners and what is distant or
small; we can also see into the past. We see long deceased ancestors when we look at dusty
snapshots of them... We see, quite literally, our dead relatives themselves when we look at
photographs of them. (Walton 1984: 251. 252)
This transparency of photography is thus for Walton the essence of photographic
realism. Like Bazin. he sees photography as gomg beyond the aim of achieving
to Walton. photographic realism is different in kind from
because we actually see our relatives when we look at photographs
of iliem. And this is true. wheilier or not ilie photographs look like ilie people iliey
are of. His argument to iliis conclusion relies on going down ilie slippery slope from
ordinary seeing. through seeing through mirrors. glasses. microscopes. telescopes.
and television images. to seeing into ilie past through photographs. We do not see
through paintings and drawings. because what we see is mediated by the minds of
human b;ings and tS not mechanically produced. If all that were at stake were
verisimilitude. ilien iliere would be no essential difference between paintings and
photographs. As it is. Walton explains, photogra hic.realism is different in kind from
realism in painting.
Walton maintains that his account of photography can give a plausible explan-
ation of. for example, a picture being less shocking when ilie viewer realizes iliat it
is a photograph of a life-sized sculpture, rather ilian of a nude couple: if it is a pho-
tograph of a sculpture ilien we only see a representation of a couple, whereas if it
had been a photograph of ilie couple. ilien we would literally see ilieir nakedness.
Similarly, Walton believes iliat his account can explain ilie particular kind of experi-
ence viewers bave when they learn iliat a self-portrait by ilie photo-realist painter
Chuck Close is really a painting and not a photograph:
OUf experience of the picture and OUf attitude toward it undergo a profound transform-
ation, one which is much deeper and more significant than the change which occurs when
we discover that what we first took to be an etching, for example. is actually a pen-and-ink
drawing. It is more like discovering a guard in a wax museum to be just another wax figure.
We feel somehow less 'in contact with' Close when we learn that portrayal of him is not
photographic. (Walton 1984: 255).
Walton's critics (e.g. Martin 1986; Warburton 1988b; Currie 1991; Carroll 1996a)
have provided a range of arguments for digging our heels in at a certain point on
ilie descent down ilie slippery slope; or, to use a variant on ilie metaphor, tbey have
argued iliat ilie slope is not as slippery as Walton would have us believe. There are
relevant differences between ordinary senses of seeing and what Walton thinks of
620 NIGE.L WARBURTON
as seeing through photographs. For example, Martin (1986) has argued that more
natural breaking points occur when we distinguish between real and virtual images,
and that the length of a causal chain is a determining factor in whether or not it is
appropriate to describe an experience as one of seeing. Warburton (1988b) identi-
fied four factors characteristic of but iacKmg from the relation
-
between object and photograph: (I) virtual simultaneity (in caSeSbf ordinary see-
ing, what is seen is hap'pe';;"ing almost Simultaneously with our experience of its
happening); (2) sensitivi to change (potentially visible changes in what is seen are
matched by changes in what is seen); (3) temporal congruity (actions seen take the
----- same time as it takes us to see them); and (4) viewer's knowledge of the causal chain
(we usually have a basic knowledge about how dur perceptions are linked' to their
causes). Gregory Currie (1991) has also argued that Walton goes too far in describ-
ing the relationship between viewer and photographed object as a straightforward
perceptual one. Against Walton, he maintains that photographs are re resenta-
tional: we do not literally see through them. Currie captures differences be een
photographs and p,yntings by describing the former as natural representations and
the latteras inte?60nal representations. Photographs are natural representations
because they exHibit 'natural dependence' on their objects; that is, they display
counterfactual dependence of a kind that need not be mediated by human inten-
tion. According to Currie, when I look at a photograph of an ancestor, I see a
representation of my ancestor, not the ancestor himself.
Walton has not, however, felt the need to modify his theory in the light of these
sorts of criticism, most of which are in Martin (1986). (For Walton's replies, see
Walton 1986, 1997.) In his most recent reply, Walton maintains that both Carroll and
Currie have misconstrued his transparency thesis. They have assumed that it entails
that photographs are not representational; however, his position is that 'photo-
graphs, documentary photographs included, induce imagining seein and are rep-
-
resentationsJ!:kpictiQI\S,-\>ictures), in addition tq...being transparent' (Walton 1997:
-- ----
68). As Jonathan Friday has made clear in his useful overview of the debate (Friday
1996), the question of whether or not Walton is correct in his analysis of photo-
graphy ultimately hinges on contentious issues within the philosophy of perception.
4. MEDIUM SPECIFICITY
A notable feature of Scruton's and Walton's articles is their about pho-
tography: Scruton clearly-beliEYes that photography has that is captured by
his notion of ideal photography and 'polluted' by the use of painterly techniques,
while for Walton the essence of photograp y is its transparency in the special sense he
'-.----
PHOTOGRAPHY 621
outlines. Bazin and Cavell are equally essentialistic in their treatment of photography.
Noel Carroll has put the against essentialism or what he calls 'medium
specificity' in photography and film theory in a series of artides (Carroll 1984-5, '985,
,
1987, '996a), reprinted in his Theorizing the Moving There he
draws attention to the fact that
There is not an essence of photographic media or of photographic representation that
directs the evolution of these media or our proper appreciative responses to these media.
The media rather are adapted to the cultural purposes and projects we find for them. The
relevant types of representation we observe in photography and cinema are not a function
of the ontology of the photographic image but of the purposes we have found respectively
for still and moving photography. (Carroll 1996b: 48)
If Carroll is right that there is no intrinsic essence of photography, but rather a series
of uses to which the various photographic media can be put, then the implication
seems to be that philosophers of photography will have to look very dosely at some
of the ways in which photographs are actually used and at the meanings they
arc given in those uses. Investigating an 'ideal' of photography, or photography's
'essence: is likely to give a partial and perhaps irrelevant account of the various com-
municative potentials of the medium as they exist within particular social contexts.
5. USES OF PHOTOGRAPHY
Patrick Maynard, in a series of articles (Maynard 1983, 1985, 1989, 1991) culminating
in the book The Engine oJVisualization (Maynard 1997), has provided a framework
for understanding photography as a range of technologies put to varied uses. These
imaging technologies amplify and also filter our powers to detect things and our
powers to imagine things. Maynard's work provides a useful antidote to some of the
more simplistic assumptions of earlier theorists who have tended to ignore the
range of uses of the medium. Maynard distinguishes between photographic
tion-----<letermined by what a photograph is of qua photochemical trace-and pho-
tographic by whatii:' pictures, which be
thing at all. Photographic detections and photographic depictions can
our The blurring of what a photograph is of with what it is
a photographic depiction of has been a continuing source of confusion in the
philosophy of photography. In all his writing about photography, Maynard is very
dear about this distinction. For instance, in The Engine oJVisualization he writes:
Like any other depictive technology, photography provides methods of marking sur-
faces that entice imagining. Sometimes this is accomplished by photographing what is
depicted, sometimes not. Movies provide many routine as well as interesting examples.
622 NIGEL WARBURTON
Although King Kong depicts a giant ape climbing the Empire State Building and was made
by filming various things. none of them was an ape or the Empire State Building. The photo
stills from that sequence are not photographs of what they depict. nor would anyone expect
them to be so. (Maynard 1997: 114)
Warburton used a similar distinction to spell out the implications of various pho-
!
tographic deceptions, including the controversy surrounding the alleged staging
of Robert Capa's 'Spanish Republican Soldier at the Very Instant 'Otliis Death'
(Warburton '99"'998). We can use the term 'documentary mode' to cover uses of
photography where it is assumed that the photograph pictures what it is of; 'pic-
photographs, by contrast, are photographic which mayor
may not picture their causes. If Capa's photograph was staged, then his use of it in
photojournalistic context was a clear transgression of the role responsibilities of the
photojournalist to provide images in the documentary mode, that is, photographs
that are at least not deliberately misleading about what they are of.
Barbara Savedoff addresses the philosophical questions that arise for a different
widespread use of photography, namely, to reproduce works of art, and particularly
paintings (Savedoff t993, 1999). She maintains that relying on photographic repro-
ductions and treating them as if they were transparent rather than transformative
affects the way in which we experience and think about the paintings themselves.
6. PHOTOGRAPHY AND MORAL
KNOWLEDGE
In her speculative series of essays published as On Photography, Susan Sontag
echoed some of Plato's worries about the superficiality of pictorial representations.
In particular, she claimed that photographs, because they deal only with static
appearances and not with change over time, cannot provide understamlingof the
world, and so can t furnish ethical knowledge:
Strictly one never understands anything from a photograph . . . In contrast to the amorous
relation which is based on how something looks. understanding is based on how it func-
tions. And functioning takes place in time, and must b?explained in tIme:lJiiIjrthat whICh
.e..----..... ---
can make us understand.
_. l<1 The li'll!l..of photographic knowledge of the world is that, while it can goad conscience,
)J' it can, finally, never be ethical or political knowledge. (Sontag 1979: 23-4)-7 --
- ---
Stephanie Ross (1982) drew on some of Scruton's arguments about photography to
find support for Sontag's description of photography's limitations.
however, like Sontag's, are misleading. Photography does have a range of narrative
-
PHOTOGRAPHY 623
techniques available to it, such as the use of a series of images, or of an implied
appropriate reading of events unfolding in time, and consequently the attack-on
photography's potential to communicate about events taking place over time is
arguab!y misplaced (see Warburton 1988a).
7. TOWARDS A PHILOSOPHY OF
PHOTOGRAPHIC ART
The philosophical investigation of photographic art is still in a relatively early
phase. Few of those philosophers who have turned their attention to photography
have a<Iaressed in detail questions that arise specifically for photographic art as
opposed to photography in general. One recent exception is Barbara Savedoff in
her Transformi!(g Images (Savedoff 1999). Savedoff stresses the transformative pow-
ers of photographs: photographs transform their sll.!>ject matter in various ways,
yet we cannot easily help seemg them as recording or docUinenting reality. Rightly
or wrongly, we perceive photo >Its as more objective than paintings. This com-
bin:rttOrl o!!eatures gives the e;:herience of viewing photographs its unioue char-
--- -
acter. The power of particular p otographic images to fascinate us often depends
on their nature. Savedoff makes her case, which is illuminating
about our experience of photographic art, by drawing on a range of photographic
examples, including photographs of representations.
Warburton has addressed another aspect of photographic art, the question of
which photographic prints should be considered 'authentic' or definitive, and why
(Warburton 1997). He argues that the artworld's preference for so-called 'vintage
prints' is not generally a rational one.
8. DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY
The recent invention of digital photography has already brought about many
changes in the ways photographs are used and understood. The new technology
converts an image to pixels, each of which can be electronically controlled. It has
allowed analogue images to be replaced wi!h-digital ones, thus permitting exact
reproduction-a direct result of the fact that digital photographs
amount of information. This has once again raised questions of photographic
624 NIGEL WARBURTON
evidence: now that photographs can be so easily manipulated in virtually unde-
tectable ways, by almost anyone, without leaving the archival evidence of tamper-
ing provided by a negative, a number of writers have suggested that the days
of documentary photography are numbered. William . Mitchell, for example,
has declared that we are entering a 'postj,.hotographic age', a position based on
a somewhat sentimental view of photography's past:
the process of photographic image construction is highly standardized, its representational
commitments are well known, and the intentional relationships of standard photographs to
their subject are relatively straightforward and unambiguous. (Mitchell 1992: 222).
More plausibly, Savedoff (1997,1999) has speculated about the possible implications
of the new technology, emphasizing the 4'evitable s i ~ aesthetics of photog-
raphy once, as seems likely, the 'evidential authority surrounding traditional photo-
graphs' is lost. Other writers (Ritchin 1990; Warburton 1998) have argued that the
new technology for the most part brings to the fore issues that have always existed
for photography, such as the relationship between documentary photographs and
reality:
In the field of photojournalism it is clear that journalistic principles and not vague photo-
graphic mythology must be invoked in attempting to maintain both an active role for the
photograph and the public's confidence. Such clarification should encourage a belated
acknowledgement of photography's subjectivity and range, its different uses, approaches,
sources, and ambitions. Photographs will have to be treated less monolithically, with the
understanding that, like words, images can be used for a variety of purposes and can be pro-
duced according to different strategies. They may be factual or fantastic, reportorial or opin-
ionated. (Ritchin 1990: 144)
Far from inevitably bringing about the demise of documentary photography, the
invention of digital photography and the range of new choices it gives photographs
should clarify its value in providing legible visual evidence that has the power to
extend our moral imaginations. The conventions of documentary photography can
continue to exist alongside the pictorialist conventions of digital imaging, though
this is by no means inevitable.
9. CONCLUSION
The philosophy orphotography remains a relatively une lored area of aesthetics.
There areIna:rrf'frilportant questions yet to be addre oncernmg ph<rtO)Ournal-
ism and photographic art, questions drawing on the philosophy of representation,
on ethics, and on the theory of criticism.
PHOTOGRAPHY 625
See also: Painting; Film; Representation in Art; Medium in Art; Style in Art; Art and
Morality; Aesthetics of Popular Art.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Barthes, R. (1984). Camera Lucida, trans. R. Howard. London: Fontana.
Balkin, N. (1991). 'Paul Strand's Photographs in Camerawork'. Midwest Studies in Philosophy
16: 3'4-51.
Baudelaire, C. (1859). 'Photography', in B. Newhall (ed.) (1981) Photography: Essays and
Images. London: Seeker and Warburg pp. 112-14.
Bazin, A. ('945). 'The Ontology of the Photographic Image', reprinted in A. Bazin, What is -
Cinema?, trans. H. Gray. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967, pp. 9-17.
--(1951). 'Theatre and Cinema', in A. Bazin, What is Cinema?, trans. H. Gray. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1967, pp. 76-124.
Blocker, H. (1977). 'Pictures and Photographs'. journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 36:
'55-62.
Carroll, N. (1984-5). 'Medium Specificity Arguments and the Self-consciously Invented
Arts'. Millenium Film journal 14h5: 127-53; reprinted in Carroll (1996b): 3-24.
--(1985). 'The Specificity of Media in the Arts'. journal of Aesthetic Education 19: 5-20;
reprinted in Carroll (1996b): 25-36.
--(1987). 'Concerning Uniqueness Claims for Photographic and Cinematographic
Representation'. Dialectics and Humanism 2: 29-43; reprinted in CarrolJ (1996b): 37-48.
--(1996a). 'Defining the Moving Image', in Carroll (1996b): 49-74.
--(1996b). Theorizing the Moving Image. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Cavell, S. (1979). The World Viewed, rev. edn. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press;
first published 1971.
Currie, G. (1991). 'Photography, Painting and Perception'. journal of Aesthetics and Art
Criticism 49: 2)--9.
--(1998). 'Photography, Aesthetics of', in E. Craig (ed.), The Routledge Encyclopedia of
Philosophy, vol. 7. London: Routledge, pp. 378-80.
Friday,). (1996). 'Transparency and the Photographic Image'. British journal ofAesthetics 36:
30-42.
--(2001). 'Photography and the Representation of Vision'. journal of Aesthetics and Art
Criticism 59: 351-62.
--(2002). The Aesthetics of Photography. Aldershot: Ashgate.
King, W. (1992). 'Scruton and the Reasons for Looking at Photographs'. British journal of
Aesthetics 32: 258-65.
Martin, E. (1986). 'On Seeing Walton's Great-Grandfather'. Critical Inquiry 12: 796-800.
Maynard, P. (1983). 'The Secular Icon: Photography and the Functions of Images'. journal of
Aesthetics and Art Criticism 42: 155-70.
--(1985). 'Drawing and Shooting: Causality in Depiction'. journal of Aesthetics and Art
Criticism 44: 115-29
--(1989). 'Talbot's Technologies: Photographic Depiction, Detection, and Reproduction:
Journal ofAesthetics and Art Criticism 47: 263-76.
626 NIGEL WARBURTON
Maynard, P. (1991). 'Photo-opportunity: Photography as Technology'. Canadian Review of
American Studies 22: 501-28.
--(1997). The Engine of Visualization: Thinking through Photography. Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press.
--(2001). 'Photograpy', in B. Gaut and D. Lopes (cds.), Routledge Companion to Aesthetics.
London: Routledge.
Mitchell, W. (1992). The Invented Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era. Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press.
Ritchin, F. (1990). In Our Own Image: The Coming Revolution in Photography. New York:
Aperture.
Ross, S. (1982). 'What Photographs Can't Do'. 'ournal ofAesthetics and Art Criticism 41: 5-17.
Savedoff, B. (1993). 'Looking at Art Through Photographs'. 'ournal of Aesthetics and Art
Criticism 51: 455-62.
--(1997). 'Escaping Reality: Digital Imagery and the Resources of Photography'. 'ournal
ofAesthetics and Art Criticism 55: 201-14.
--(1999). Transforming Images: How Photography Complicates the Picture. Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press.
Scruton, R. (1983). 'Photography and Representation', in R. Scruton, The Aesthetic
Understanding: Essays in The Philosophy ofArt and Culture. London: Methuen, pp. 102-26;
first published in Critical Inquiry 7: 577-603.
Snyder, J. (1983). 'Photography and Ontology', in j. Margolis (cd.), The Worlds ofArt and the
World. pp. 21-34.
--and Allen, N. W. (1975). 'Photography, Vision and Representation'. Critical Inquiry 2:
143-69
Sontag, S. (1979). On Photography. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Walton, K. (1984). 'Transparent Pictures: On the Nature of Photographic Realism: Critical
11: :46-77.
--(1986). 'Looking Again through Photographs: A Response to Edwin Martin'. Critical
Inq'!iiYu: 801-8.
--(1997). 'On Pictures and Photographs: Objections Answered', in R. Allen and M. Smith
(eds.),fi/m Theory and Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 60-75.
Warburton, N. (19880). 'Photographic Communication'. British 'ournal of Aesthetics 28:
173-81.
--(1988b). 'Seeing Through "Seeing through Photographs" '. Ratio, n.s. 1: 64-74.
--(1991). 'Varieties of Photographic Representation'. History of Photography 15: 203-10.
--(1996). 'Individual Style in Photographic Art'. British 'ournal ofAesthetics 36: 389-97.
--(1997). 'Authentic Photographs'. British 'ournal of Aesthetics 37: 129-37.
--(1998). 'Ethical Photojournalism in the Age of the Electronic Darkroom', in M. Kieran
(cd.), Media Ethics. London: Routledge, pp. 123-34.
irks, R. (1989). 'Photography as Representational Art'. British 'ournal ofAesthetics 29: 1-9.

S-ar putea să vă placă și