Abstract

Issues connected to the pair of notions of image and reality have been present in philosophy at least since Plato’s times. The main question that accompanies the mentioned notions concerns the relation between image and reality. Does image present reality adequately, or is it perhaps a sort of falsification? However, this question may have no sense, because, as it is claimed for example by Richard Rorty, there is no possibility to differentiate between image and reality. An interesting exemplification of the mentioned issue is the philosophy of photography, where the question about representation takes the following form: does a photograph (as an image) adequately mirror given reality? The aim of this paper is to present the problem of representationalism and antirepresentationalism, first in the broad philosophical context (based on the example of Rorty’s considerations), and then in the field of the philosophy of photography (based on the example of Barthes’s and Flusser’s reflections).