Media philosopher Vilém Flusser proposed a revolutionary new way of thinking about photography.

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 paper focuses on the following question: how is philosophy of anything possible? Where lies the boundary of specialisation area beyond which the term?philosophy? loses not only its strength, but also its meaning? When we talk about specific genre, for example, graphic art or sculpture we use the term?philosophy? in a broader, metaphorical sense. Why then should philosophy of photography be any different? All of the abovementioned questions are discussed in the present article. Philosophy (...) of photography is, indeed, a legitimate discipline, just as philosophy of language, philosophy of science and technology and philosophy of politics are. nema. (shrink)

사진은 사진의 발명 이전의 이미지들과 비교할 때, 무엇을 지시하고 있는지가 너무나 명확하게 드러나 있는 것처럼 보여서, 이미지를 생산한 사람의 의도가 그 이면에 숨겨져 있을 여지가 없는 것으로 여겨졌다. 다시 말해 사진 역시 전통적 그림과 같은 이차원 평면의 이미지이긴 하지만, 전통적 그림의 의미가 다의적(konnotativ)일 수 있는 것과 달리, 사진은 마치 숫자처럼 그 지시대상이 명확한 일의적(denotativ) 이미지로 간주되어왔다. 이는 예술적 측면에서는 특히 회화와 비교되며 폄하되는 요소로 작용해 왔고, 기술적 측면에서는 때때로 과장되게 수용되어 사진을 마치 세상을 투영하고 있는 창문처럼 여기게 하는 근거가 되어왔다.BR빌렘 (...) 플루서(Vilém Flusser)는 이러한 현상에 대해 사진을 전통적 그림과 동일한 존재 층위에 위치시킨 결과로 인한 오해라고 보았다. 이는 이미지와 실재라는 관계항 속에서 새로운 이미지인 사진에 대해, 새로운 존재론적 질문이 제기되어야 함을 의미하는 것이라 하겠다. 기존의 사진 이론들이 사진에 대해 ‘어떻게 실제적으로 사진이 존재하는가’라던지, 혹은 ‘하나의 보편적인 사진 언어가 존재하는가’와 같은 질문에 집중해왔던 것 모두, 사진 의미의 일의성이라는 특징이 전제되어 있기 때문이며, 이러한 전제는 사진이 그 원본과의 관계, 즉 지표성(Indexikalität)이라는 관점에서 해석되어 왔음을 보여주는 예라 하겠다.BR그러나 플루서는 이러한 방식의 사진 이해에 비판적 견해를 가지고서, 사진을 지표성의 관점에서가 아니라, 현상학적 관점에서 관찰하고자 하였다. 그리고 이를 통해 사진을 통한 새로운 철학적 방법론을 모색하고자 하였다. 이는 후설의 현상학적 개념, 예를 들어 지향성이나 판단중지와 같은 개념들을 자신의 사진 철학에 수용함으로써 이뤄졌다.BR이에 본고는 ‘사진 촬영자의 몸짓(fotografische Geste)’ 개념을 통해 플루서가 사진을 지표성이라는 관점에서 벗어나, 어떻게 후설의 현상학에 접목시키고 있는지에 대해서 분석함으로써, 플루서에 의해 시도된 사진에 대한 새로운 철학적 해석에 대해 고찰하는 것을 목적으로 한다. (shrink)

Dominic McIver Lopes’ Four Arts of Photography and Diarmuid Costello’s On Photography: A Philosophical Inquiry examine the state of the art in analytic philosophy of photography and present a new approach to the study of the medium. As opposed to the orthodox and prevalent view, which emphasizes its epistemic capacities, the new theory reconsiders the nature of photography, and redirects focus towards the aesthetic potential of the medium. This symposium comprises two papers that critically examine (...) central questions addressed in the two books, with responses by the two authors in defence of their respective positions. (shrink)

Four Arts of Photography explores the history of photography through the lens of philosophy and proposes a new understanding of the art form for the 21st century.

Two events in particular occasion this volume on the philosophy of photography: the blurring of boundaries that many took to demarcate photographic technology and practices from other representational and artistic technologies and the invention of digital photography. The purpose of this volume is not to revive older questions by asking what, if anything, still distinguishes photography in the light of these developments, but to consider sundry questions about the materials and tools—or media—of photography from a (...) variety of perspectives. critically examines classic and influential arguments in philosophy of photography addresses recent trends in photographic art, such as conceptualism and appropriation highlights philosophically neglected elements of photographic art, such as performativity and self-portraiture reexamines the role of photographic media in photographic art practices offers new perspectives of the impact of digital technologies on photography explores the relationship between photographic art and photography in other arts and in science brings a range of philosophical methodologies and traditions into dialogue incorporates extended discussions of the work of important photographers and artists who use photography illustrates philosophical points with reproductions, many of them not widely known closely connects philosophical theory to the details of photographic practice offers original and novel theories of the aesthetic, artistic, and epistemic values of photographs. (shrink)

Four Arts of Photography: An Essay in PhilosophyLopesDominic Mciverwiley & sons ltd. 2016. pp. 200. £80.50.

This roundtable discussion is based on an online symposium – The Promise of Photography: Scale, Measure and Proportion in a Conflicted Visual Milieu – which took place on 17 September 2021. Since its inception, photography has promised to set things to scale, to grant them measure and proportion, a series of promises that have also entailed moments of irrationality or conflict that persist in and continue to shape the era of global networked digital imaging technologies. The symposium started (...) out from the diagnosis that, whilst photography continues to promise an ordered, proportionate and measured world in which things can be set to their proper scale, it also acts in many ways as an agent of dismeasure, disproportion and the unscalable. In light of this, the roundtable discussion presented here examines a range of different meanings that scale, measure and proportion have accrued in the photographic context and sets out to explore conceptual frameworks and research methodologies through which the current situation might be understood. (shrink)

This article takes as its focus the concept of the ‘afterimage’ and its relationship to memory, the synaesthetic experience of perception and the multisensory turn within the study of photographic images. Afterimages have consistently been described as phenomena of visual persistence where, optically, a recorded moment of the past leaks into the present and remains visible before us on our retinas. By recasting this originary understanding of an afterimage as simply a ghostly, optical occurrence and insisting that the phenomenon exceeds (...) the visual and is rather an intersensorial occurrence, I seek to present how encounters with images stay with us in powerful ways and across many senses at once. As an intervention within the field of image theory and photography studies that builds upon the relatively recent turn away from prioritizing visuality and instead shifting towards multisensoriality – what we might also term as the ‘more-than visual’ – this piece proposes that if images exceed the visual and carry with them physical, haptic, sonic and affective qualities, then perhaps the afterimage is not something that we merely see but also what we can feel and hear and move-with. Perhaps the afterimage carries an intensity and an afterlife which lingers in our minds and can take hold of our entire body and our senses, composing and recomposing them over time. By pairing such inquiries alongside the narrative, literary and poetic works of Dionne Brand and Nathaniel Mackey – both of whom write of the intersensorial quality of photographs and afterimages with a particular kind of lively openness – I am hoping to intervene into the ongoing ‘more-than visual’ turn within the field of image theory by infusing it with a narrative-oriented synaesthetic vocabulary. (shrink)

This article is about the therapeutic use of photography in mental health care. We will first describe the intelligent nature of perception as we understand on the basis of neurobiological research findings. We will link our interpretation of visual perception with the phenomenology of perception from the theory of Merleau‐Ponty.. Then we will discuss how patients in mental health care with mental health problems may profit by an experiential approach that is concomitant with the existential reality described by Merleau‐Ponty. (...) The experiential approach we go into more detail is Focusing. We will demonstrate the limitations and feasibility of Focusing in the procedures of working with photography as a therapeutic medium. (shrink)

What is photography? -- Rethinking the political -- The photograph as the source of civil knowledge -- Civil uses of photography.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Place: Towards a Geophilosophy of Photography by Ali ShobeiriElizabeth. L. CoxPlace: Towards a Geophilosophy of Photography BY ALI SHOBEIRI Leiden, The Netherlands: Leiden University Press, 2021In his most recent work, Place: Towards a Geophilosophy of Photography, Ali Shobeiri skilfully demonstrates both the importance of, and fluid ways in which, place plays a dynamic role in the understanding and stories nestled within the seeing and evaluating (...) of photographs and photography. Bringing together the worlds of photography, geography, and philosophy to create an interdisciplinary theoretical understanding of place in relation to photography, Shobeiri has expertly unearthed a nuanced, exciting way of considering the photographic process and images.Shobeiri, an Assistant Professor of Photographic Studies and Visual Arts Theory at Leiden University, brings his knowledge and expertise of visual culture, photographic theory, human geography, and philosophy to the fore in his latest publication. His knowledge, passion, personal interest in photography, and his critical thought come through nicely in his writing, and it is clear that the development of Shobeiri’s ideas and framework have been given a lot of thought, time, and energy. This book meaningfully speaks to those interested in a discussion of place within the realm of photography, evidenced through the depth of knowledge and sheer detail explored within this book.Inspired by his own experience as a photographer and influenced by Edward Casey’s “delimited” definition of place, Shobeiri explores how place is never simply presented or fixed (11). It is here that he expertly uses photography to do this across six different yet clearly complimentary chapters. Critically, there is no way to give a succinct overview of the chapters of this book without losing meaning and diluting Shobeiri’s message; the book is rich, deeply detailed, embedded within philosophical thought, and is nuanced throughout, which is important to remember when reading this non- fiction piece of work.In the first chapter, Shobeiri provides a phenomenological exploration of the importance of the photographer’s body both as a lived experience and a physical entity. He then juxtaposes this duality to the lived [End Page 136] place of the photograph, returning to the notion of fixedness and using the idea of belonging to explore the photographer’s body and the photographic experience as a lived place. The next chapter discusses spatiality and time, and the way in which space is temporalized, using key influences such as Roland Barthes and Susan Collins to illustrate the argument. Central to this is the idea that a photograph captures time, but also aims at space, which raises questions about what this means for the space before the lens. In chapters 3 and 4, the author argues that the photograph itself travels through space, and highlights the importance of the photographic place, allowing us to “bestow meaning upon that space on the photograph’s surface” (67). Interestingly, Shobeiri points to philosophy to help the reader understand this, such as Jacques Derrida, and uses more familiar images and scholarly thought from NASA to discuss blind field and the liminality of photographic place. Chapter 5 moves away from location and journeys the reader to a discussion of places viewed as moment of encounter, specifically considering the spectator and the photograph. This evolves further in the sixth and final chapter insofar as it explores the transition and translation of the photographed place to the communication of the content of the image and the agency of the photograph. Shobeiri finishes with a simple yet engaging epilogue, several helpful notes, and a plethora of references which are useful for further reading.Place: Towards a Geophilosophy of Photography is genuinely interesting, centred within academic scholarship, and employs the thought of theorists that readers of Environment, Space, Place will undoubtably recognise. Scholarly figureheads such as Jacques Derrida, Alain Badiou, and Michel Foucault, space and place authorities such as Tim Cresswell, Tim Ingold, and Doreen Massey, and art aficionados such as Roland Barthes, Susan Collins, and John Berger frequent the pages. Familiar artistic names are also drawn upon, including Ansel Adams, Gert Jan Kocken, and Gerhard Richter, which soften the strong academic tones that this book voices. This work is clearly sophisticated in terms of lexicon and ideas, however... (shrink)

Some photographs show determinate features of a scene because the photographed scene had those features. This dependency relation is, rightly, a consensus in philosophy of photography. I seek to refute many long-established theories of photography by arguing that they are incompatible with this commitment. In Section II, I classify accounts of photography as either single-stage or multi-stage. In Section III, I analyze the historical basis for single-stage accounts. In Section IV, I explain why the single-stage view (...) led scientists to postulate “latent” photographic images as a technical phenomenon in early chemical photography. In Section V, I discredit the notion of an invisible latent image in chemical photography and, in Section VI, extend this objection to the legacy of the latent image in digital photography. In Section VII, I appeal to the dependency relation to explain why the notion of a latent image makes the single-stage account untenable. Finally, I use the multi-stage account to advance debate about “new” versus “orthodox” theories of photography. (shrink)

This article sets out to draft a preliminary sketch of an environmental history of photography, as opposed to a history of environmental photography. It shows that such a history should be rooted in a conceptualization of our geological epoch as the Capitalocene: the age of capital. Seen in this light, photography can be understood as part of a longer history of what the article describes – building on the work of activist and journalist Raj Patel and environmental (...) historian Jason W. Moore (2018) – as the ‘cheap image’. In this way, photography is shown to offer a succinct expression of the Cartesian dualism that Patel and Moore see as being at the heart of the Capitalocene: the externalized image of capital N nature that this world ecology necessitated. The article considers Mining Photography: The Ecological Footprint of Image Production (Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, Hamburg, 2022) a recent exhibition and catalogue that attempted to narrate in exhibition form a history of photography from such a perspective. Finally, it concludes with a discussion of the work of several artists from this exhibition who are seen as exemplifying ‘metabolic realism’, a new critical photo-based artistic approach. (shrink)

As we settle further into the era of digital media and globalized visual culture, it might be tempting to think that photography holds no more than historical interest. Yet it continues to feature in debates with considerable significance for the present.1 The terms by which it was negotiated in the twentieth century – the print, the negative and the mechanical-optical apparatus, the affective experience of a moment stilled, and any truth that its rendering promises – have been technically and (...) culturally displaced and expanded. New instabilities have become familiar and have distanced us from how photography was understood, even in the fairly recent past. The current historical conjuncture is marked by a widespread suspicion that existing theories – including those that turned, in the 1970s, to Marxism, feminist critique, semiotics or psychoanalysis so as to politicize and contest mainstream photographic culture – might no longer be adequate to photography’s contemporary situation. That photography still matters, however, can be evidenced, prosaically and contingently, by noting the increasing number of new scholarly journals and exhibitions devoted to its past, present and future in recent years.2 There is, in this – as Fred Ritchin is only the latest to note – a sense that the undoing of photography’s prior certainties constitutes an ending and an enlargement. The fate of photography provides an ‘expansive filter’ through which to chart the ‘chaos of possibilities that emerge and recede, back up and move forward, crisscrossing each other.’3 Expectations of the new and the old, the obsolete and as yet only anticipated, are thrown into temporal disarray as its openness to reformation gives the photographic past a futural slant. (shrink)

I begin by examining perception of photographs from two directions: what we think photographs are, and the aspects of mind involved when viewing photographs. Traditional photographs are shown to be mnemonic tools, and memory identified as a key part of the process by which photographs are fully perceived. Second, I describe the metamorphogram; a non-traditional photograph which fits specific, author-defined criteria for being memory. The metamorphogram is shown to be analogous to a composite of all an individual’s episodic memories. Finally, (...) using the metamorphogram in artistic works suggests a bi-directional relationship between individual autobiographical memory and shared cultural memory. A model of this relationship fails to align with existing definitions of cultural memory, and may represent a new form: sociobiographical memory. I propose that the experiences documented here make the case for promoting a mutually beneficial relationship between philosophy and other creative disciplines, including photography. (shrink)

In recent years, discourses on photography have undergone a transformative shift from a focus on the individual photograph’s connection to memory, pastness, loss, and death towards exploring photographic imagery as shared, networked, and continuously circulating in a ubiquitous present. The general claim for the temporal dimension in this shift is that photography is no longer seen as a mere witness or reservoir of the past but instead points to or participates in an active present. Against this claim, the (...) article argues for broadening the perspective, drawing on resources across C.P. Snow’s “two cultures”—the arts and humanities vs. the natural sciences—to develop a better conception of time and a more varied and useful selection of photographic practices. In this connection, the article provides a reading of Paul Ricoeur’s compound concept of “the third time”, cutting across the two cultures. Drawing on insights from Patrick Maynard and Kelley Wilder, basic premises for photographic practices in the natural sciences are brought into the discussions of the discursive shift from a preoccupation with photography and the past to an interest in photography and the present. The purpose of this paper is to develop a better ground for navigating intricate questions about the relationship between photography and time. (shrink)

The recent proliferation of deepfakes and other digitally produced deceptive representations has revived the debate on the epistemic robustness of photography and other mechanically produced images. Authors such as Rini (2020) and Fallis (2021) claim that the proliferation of deepfakes pose a serious threat to the reliability and the epistemic value of photographs and videos. In particular, Fallis adopts a Skyrmsian account of how signals carry information (Skyrms, 2010) to argue that the existence of deepfakes significantly reduces the information (...) that images carry about the world, which undermines their reliability as a source of evidence. In this paper, we focus on Fallis’ version of the challenge, but our results can be generalized to address similar pessimistic views such as Rini’s. More generally, we offer an account of the epistemic robustness of photography and videos that allows us to understand these systems of representation as continuous with other means of information transmission we find in nature. This account will then give us the necessary tools to put Fallis’ claims into perspective: using a richer approach to animal signaling based on the signaling model of communication (Maynard-Smith and Harper, 2003), we will claim that, while it might be true that deepfake technology increases the probability of obtaining false positives, the dimension of the epistemic threat involved might still be negligible. (shrink)

Exposure is key element of photography as well as in the relationship between the category of regime and the subjects it entails. This article sets out to re-examine the characteristics of exposure across these different contexts and on the basis of Jean-Luc Nancy’s thought. The article focuses on the relation between the practice of photography and civil actions pursued by human rights organizations. Combining theoretical ­considerations, analysis of photographs and interviews with human rights workers, the article points to (...) the key role that exposure plays in civic action and seeks to articulate its complexity. Adopting an ­interdisciplinary methodology, the article argues that exposure is no simple relation between an ‘exposer’ and that which is ‘exposed’, but, rather, that as a process exposure reveals complex social political dynamics which defy ­conventional binary determinations of such relations. (shrink)

Unlike the numerous texts devoted to the subject of Film Theory, this collection contains essays specifically about the art form of Still Photography and the ...

The present essay represents for the author an occasion to retrace his philosophy of art, referring in particular to the themes related to contemporary art. Starting from the historical importance which the photographic experiments of Eadweard Muybridge had for painting (and not only), Arthur Danto once again comes to wonder about the famous Brillo Box of Andy Warhol, demonstrating how, in the face of different avant-guard artistic movements of the early Sixties (specially in the usa), it is indeed (...) class='Hi'>philosophy that questions itself, reconsidering its own concept of the eternity of art and the way in which works of art must be interpreted. (shrink)

North by Northwest -- Metaphor and the cultivation of intimacy -- Notes on metaphor -- What's special about photography? -- Sports and art -- Clay for contemplation -- There are no ties at first base -- A driving examination -- Objects of appreciation -- And what if they don't laugh? -- Liking what's good: why should we? -- Language games -- Ethics class -- Kings and salesmen -- One way to think about popular art -- Caring -- The idea (...) of absolute gin -- Playing by the rules -- Freedom from rules. (shrink)

Recent criticism has already shown that the notoriously unanswered plot questions of The Big Sleep elicit serious philosophical issues, including skepticism about the validity of interpretation itself. The film allegorizes the reason for this questioning in what Derrida calls the "blackmail" of photography--its coercive claim to represent objective truth. Blackmail arising from photography is the main plot premise of The Big Sleep, but it serves as a figure for the "postal" world of signs divorced from referents, finally epitomized (...) in thel groundlessness of Marlowe's logic and final conclusions. Parallels are drawn between this Derridean world and Adorno's writings, in the light of Derrida's acknowledgement of their affinity. The phrase "big sleep" is gangster-slang for death, but this essay argues that it also refers to life, understood in the Buddhist sense of the human illusion of a waking or enlightened life. (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 is a critical survey of writing on the philosophy of photography.

This dissertation examines the relationship that exists between two distinct and seemingly incompatible bodies of scholarship within the field of contemporary philosophy of technology. The first, as argued by postmodern pragmatist Barry Allen, posits that our tools and what we make with them are epistemically important; disputing the idea that knowledge is strictly sentential or propositional, he claims instead that knowledge is the product of a performance that is both superlative and artefactual, rendering technology importantly world-constituting. The second, as (...) argued by Heidegger and his inheritors, is that technology is ontologically problematic; rather than technology being evidence of performative knowledge, it is instead existentially threatening by virtue of the fact that it changes the tenor of our relationship with the world-as-given. Despite the fact that these claims seem prima facie incompatible, I argue that they may be successfully reconciled by introducing a third body of scholarship: the philosophy of photography. For it is the case, I argue, that although we, qua human beings, occupy lifeworlds that are necessarily constituted by technology, technology also induces a kind of phenomenological scepticism: a concern that mediated action precludes us from the possibility of authentic experience. Arguing in favour of the sentiment that photographs serve as a kind of phenomenal anchor—a kind of machine for living—I claim that photographic images provide a panacea to this existential concern: despite being epistemically problematic, it is this selfsame epistemic “specialness” of photographs that forces us to phenomenologically recommit, if only temporarily, to the world in a serious way. Consequently, it is my belief that an analysis of our artefacts and the way they function is fundamentally incomplete without an analysis of the epistemic and ontological problems introduced of the photographic image; as I will demonstrate, the photographic image casts an extremely long shadow over the philosophy of technology. (shrink)

Over three decades, Gillian Howie wrote at the forefront of philosophy and critical theory, before her untimely death in 2013. This interdisciplinary collection uses her writings to explore the productive, yet often resistant, interrelationship between feminism and critical theory, examining the potential of Howie's particular form of materialism. The contributors also bring to this debate a serious engagement with Howie's late turn towards philosophies of mortality, therapy and 'living with dying'. The volume considers how differently embodied subjects are positioned (...) within public institutions, discourses and spaces, and the role of philosophy, art, film, photography, and literature, in facing situations such as sexual oppression and life-limiting illness. (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)

The development of X-ray diffraction photography was central to the discovery of the helical structure of DNA in 1953. Unfortunately the story of how this technique was developed receded into the background as subsequent attention focused on the moment of discovery by Watson and Crick. As a result the importance of photography as ‘data’ and the role it plays in scientific discovery is underplayed. We seek to rectify this situation by presenting this story and by drawing conclusions about (...) the importance of this form of photography in scientific investigation as well as for the insights it gives us regarding the process of discovery. (shrink)

What is photography? Is it primarily a source of knowledge about the world or an art? Many have said the former, because it records the world automatically, others the latter because it embodies human subjectivity. Can it photography be both or must we choose? In On Photography: A Philosophical Inquiry Diarmuid Costello examines these fascinating questions and more. In so doing he introduces some of the fundamental topics and debates about the nature of photography, with the (...) help of photographic images from Paul Strand, Lee Friedlander, James Welling, Jeff Wall, and Gerhard Richter, among others. Tracing the roots of thinking about photography from its discovery, through Nineteenth Century debates about its standing as art, to Twentieth Century Modernism and post-War cultural criticism, Costello identifies the emergence of a powerful "orthodox" view of photography. The features that make photographs compelling documents are precisely those that put pressure on its standing as art; though they provide a wealth of empirical information, they cannot have the unifying vision we look for in art. He draws on the reflections of photographers and theorists, including Paul Strand, Edward Weston, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Siegfried Kracauer, Andre Bazin and Stanley Cavell to illustrate this fundamental tension. The view comes to fruition in the work of Roger Scruton and Kendall Walton. Whether pure photography is capable of representing fictions, or always presents a transparent window onto the real world becomes the key question. Recently, the orthodox view has come under increasing pressure from a new generation of philosophers who reject the contrast between machine and hand made images that underwrites it. He concludes by examining photographic agency in a digital age. Written in a clear and engaging style, On Photography: A Philosophical Inquiry is essential reading for anyone interested in the philosophy of photography, aesthetics, art, and visual studies. (shrink)

This volume investigates the meaning of visual rhythm through Piet Mondrian's unique approach to understanding rhythm in the compositional structure of painting, drawing reference from philosophy, aesthetics, and Zen culture. Its innovation lies in its reappraisal of a forgotten definition of rhythm as 'stasis' or 'composition' which can be traced back to ancient Greek thought. This conception of rhythm, the book argues, can be demonstrated in terms of pictorial strategy, through analysis of East Asian painting and calligraphy with which (...) Greek thought on rhythm has identifiable commonalities. The book demonstrates how these ideas about rhythm draw together various threads of intellectual development in the visual arts that cross disparate aesthetic cultural practices. As an icon of early 20th Century Modernism, Mondrian's neoplasticism is a serious painterly and philosophical achievement. In his painting, Mondrian was deeply influenced by Theosophy, which took its influence from Eastern aesthetics; particularly East Asian and Indian thought. However, Mondrian's approach to visual rhythm was so idiosyncratic that his contribution to studies of visual rhythm is often under-recognized. This volume shows that a close inspection of Mondrian's own writing, thinking and painting has much to tell scholars about how to understand a long forgotten aspect of visual rhythm. Rodin's famous criticism of photography ("athlete-in-motion is forever frozen") can be applied to Muybridge's zoopraxiscope, the Futurists' rendition of stroboscopic images, and Duchamp's "Nude Descending a Staircase." Through a comparative study between Mondrian's painting and these seminal works, this volume initiates a new convention for the cognition of the surface of painting as visual rhythm. "Mondrian's simultaneous emphasis on the static and the rhythmic is hardly fodder for a publicist. Eiichi Tosaki has taken on the challenge of elucidating Mondrian's theories of rhythm, and particularly his conception of "static" rhythm. The result is a tour de force that will forever alter the reader's encounter with the works of Mondrian." Prof. Kathleen Higgins. (shrink)

In recent years, photographs and visualisations of glacier retreat have become emblematic images of climate change and its ecological consequences. This paper presents glacier photography as a subtype of environmental photography. I argue that photographs and photographic projects that focus on glacial retreat are best conceived not only as strategies for proving climate change or as visual rhetoric for social transformation, but also as a practice that potentially plays an integral role in dealing and coping with human-induced environmental (...) loss. To this end, I draw on praxeological accounts in theory of photography and philosophy of art as well as some exemplary photographic projects to develop a framework to analyse glacier photography. With the help of this praxeological framework, multiple orientations in glacier photography are identified: epistemic, aesthetic, emotional and evocative, social, ethical, and political orientations. All these photographic orientations, I argue, point in their own way to the process and consequences of glacial disappearance and loss. The framework presented innovatively brings together scholarship on climate change visualisation, imagery and art, the theory of photography, and philosophical aesthetics. (shrink)

Nous voulons montrer que les théories générales de la dépiction et les théories de la photographie diffèrent dans la manière dont elles ont jusqu’à présent mobilisé (ou non) la notion de ressemblance. En insistant sur la différence entre peinture et photographie, et sur la photographie en tant qu’ensemble de produits (les images photographiques) plutôt que sur la photographie en tant que technologie de production d’images, la plupart des théories existantes de la photographie se sont empêchées de comprendre quel est le (...) rôle exact de la ressemblance dans la dépiction photographique. Nous soulignons ce fait et suggérons qu’une distinction entre détection et dépiction est essentielle pour permettre le renouvellement de la philosophie de la photographie. (shrink)

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.

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.

This article proposes a cybernetic photographic theory that takes seriously the philosophical claim that cameras, images and human beings exist as evolving systems of machines-organisms. It provides an epistemological challenge to the modernist problematic of representation – namely, the emergence of human consciousness outside and above nature, and a rationalist distinction between an active, visual-reasoning subject and a passive object. I utilize the philosophy of Francois Lauruelle in order to foreground and deepen the understanding of the ethical thought in (...) cybernetics. My purpose is to build upon ethical philosophy that, as Gilbert Simondon contended, would ‘save the technical object’. There is some urgency to this task as, in saving machines from their own histories and statuses as non-human, representational things in the world, we may begin an ethico-political programme that evaluates the complementary creative processes of human and machine – in a word, our shared Art – in order to save ourselves. It is perhaps the case that any recuperation of cybernetic and photographic theory today be poised not to reckon with our ‘digital’ moment but rather with our Anthropocene era defined by human’s extinction level powers of destruction. (shrink)

Painting -- Photography and film -- Architecture and the third dimension -- Music -- Literature -- Performance -- Popular art and everyday aesthetics -- Classic sources -- Contemporary sources.

Review of: How Photography Changed Philosophy, Daniel Rubinstein (2023) New York and Abingdon: Routledge, 122 pp., ISBN 978-0-36769-422-7, h/bk, GBP 130.00.

The aim of this paper is to contribute to the understanding of imagistic violence by focusing—by means of a phenomenology open to dialogue with neighboring disciplines, from historiography to semiotics—on the particular case of photographs depicting atrocities, examples of photojournalism or images captured at crime scenes by forensic agents and presented as evidence during trials. To this end, I will implement a three-step analysis. First, I will seek to clarify the meanings associated with photography presented as evidence by adopting (...) Husserl’s phenomenological framework and by following a historiographical and juridical approach while verifying the grounds for the opposition that appears to be emerging between a paradigm of resemblance and a model of indirect, conjectural knowledge. Second, I will focus on how photography’s capacity to sustain a maximum degree of the reproduction of the real is problematized when the pictorial object is a violent scene that suspends, contradicts, and dismantles the order of the viewer’s experience. Finally, I will conclude by offering a hypothesis on the act of “seeing-with-other” and its phenomenological implications for the case of imagistic violence as evidence. Specifically, I will argue that we are more likely to understand imagistic violence at the level of a collective seeing than through a solitary gaze. (shrink)

Many recent visual and technological changes in photography are related to the fact that it is increasingly connected to space through computerization and digitization. Photographs no longer appear as framed 2D images, but rather resemble a cloud whose viewing and operating mode necessarily involve navigation. My purpose in this article is to think about photography’s ontological and epistemological status through its contemporary spatial uses. Using two projects by Forensic Architecture, I examine two methodologies of spatial photography – (...) photogrammetric point clouds and the Image-Data Complex – and claim that, whereas with the emergence of the internet, digital photography has primarily been perceived as a networked image, today we should think of it in terms of clouds. Both projects rely on a posthuman multiplication of perspectives and a vertical conceptualization of photography as navigable space. Both also represent and demonstrate the medium’s contemporary political potential for documenting, creating evidence and organizing data. Finally, both challenge traditional definitions of photography and outline new alternatives for interrogating human rights violations. (shrink)

In this article I analyse the hidden genealogical link between portrait photography, used for criminological and psychiatric purposes, and contemporary systems of biometric identification of the human face. The aim is to highlight the shift between the emphasis on the importance of the human ‘expert eye’ in recognizing the face when talking about nineteenth-century photography and the use of computer technology that produces and reads digital facial images. In both cases, however, these are modes and variants of reducing (...) and flattening the human face; the face itself disappears under the onslaught of technologies of vision and mediation, becoming a mere data set. Special attention is devoted to the pose, the frontal view, which is the technological a priori of the empirical possibility of recognition, articulated through the history of visualization of the face from early portrait photography to facial recognition systems. Consequently, what we call the ‘face’ is a simulacra of individual the face presented to the apparatus: the ‘real’ face is transposed upon multiple technological layers (camera – plates – photographic surface), losing its characteristic features to be re-written according to specific techniques of measurement. (shrink)