About this topic
Summary The (analytic) philosophy of photography came into its own relatively recently, in the early 1980's. Since then, philosophical theorising about photography has largely been preoccupied with three issues: 1. Are photographs transparent; that is, is seeing a photograph (and related photographic media, like film and television) a way of indirectly seeing photographed objects? 2. How should one respond to scepticism about photography's aesthetic value? 3. In what does the peculiar epistemic value of photography consist? More recently, attention has turned towards a number of other issues, including: 4. What is the correct ontological category in which to locate photographs? 5. In what does the peculiar affective power of photographs consist? 6. How does digital photography challenge extant answers to questions 1-5. Answering these questions has involved philosophers drawing on related research in aesthetics concerning: pictorial experience and theories of depiction; fictionality; standards of correctness and interpretive norms more broadly; aesthetic value; and artist's intention. But philosophers interested in the philosophy of photography have also drawn on issues further afield, including: issues in the philosophy of action; information-theoretic accounts of mental content; sense-data and the possibility of indirect perception; necessary conditions for perception; and the nature of causation.
Key works The locus classicus for the theory of photographic transparency is Walton 1984. Although Walton's concern is the affect of photographs, the principal influence of this paper, apart from its prompting numerous replies in response to the idea of transparency itself, was its spawning the literature on the epistemic value of photographs. Walton's paper is best understood when read in conjunction with the postscript in Walton 2008, which clarifies a number of subtle issues arguably obscured in various early responses to, and replies from, Walton. Scepticism about photography's epistemic value is vigorously defended by Roger Scruton in Scruton 1981. This paper is likewise best understood when read in conjunction with later clarificatory replies by Scruton, including Scruton 2009. Key works on the epistemic value of photography include: Cohen & Meskin 2004, Abell 2010 and Walden 2005. Key works on the affective nature of photography (in addition to Walton 1984) include: Hopkins 2010, Pettersson 2011 and Currie 1999. Edited collections include: Walden 2010 and a special issue of the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Costello & Mciver Lopes 2012. Papers in the latter address a number of new issues in the philosophy of photography, suggesting those working in the area are beginning to move beyond the traditional issues of transparency, aesthetic scepticism and epistemic value. Notable monographs include: Maynard 1997 and Friday 2002. Three monographs in the philosophy of film that discuss photography at length are: Currie 1995, Carroll 2007 and Gaut 2010. The latter is especially notable for its theorising about the nature of digital photography.
Introductions Useful survey articles include: Costello & Phillips 2008 and Maynard 2000
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  1. The Silence: Non-Discursive Agency in Photography.Gavin Keeney - manuscript
    An essay on non-discursive forms of knowledge that inhabit art photography. A version of this essay appeared in Gavin Keeney, "Else-where": Essays in Art, Architecture, and Cultural Production 2002-2011 (CSP, 2011), pp. 209-26.
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  2. Vertiginous Acedie.Gavin Keeney - manuscript
    Review of “Gaiety is the Most Outstanding Feature of the Soviet Union: New Art from Russia,” Saatchi Gallery, London, England, and “Calder After the War,” Pace Gallery, London, England, April 2013. A version of this essay appeared in the Appendices of Gavin Keeney, Not-I/Thou: The Other Subject of Art and Architecture (CSP, 2014), pp. 157-60.
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  3. Depiction, Imagination, and Photography.Jiri Benovsky - forthcoming - In Keith Moser & Ananta Sukla (eds.), Imagination and Art: Explorations in Contemporary Theory. Brill.
    Imagination plays an important role in depiction. In this chapter, I focus on photography and I discuss the role imagination plays in photographic depiction. I suggest to follow a broadly Waltonian view, but I also depart from it in several places. I start by discussing a general feature of the relation of depiction, namely the fact that it is a ternary relation which always involves "something external." I then turn my attention to Walton's view, where this third relatum of the (...)
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  4. The body's truth: Notes on Angelo Novi's still photography from Mamma Roma (1962) to.Roberto Chiesi - forthcoming - Teorema: International Journal of Philosophy.
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  5. Philosophy of photography.Andrew Fisher & Daniel Rubenstein - forthcoming - Philosophy of Photography.
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  6. Literature and Digital Illumination.Lis Lindeman & Gregory O. Smith - forthcoming - Topoi.
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  7. Photo Mensura.Patrick Maynard - forthcoming - In Nicola Moeßner & Alfred Nordmann (eds.), The Epistemology of Measurement: Representational and Technological Dimensions. Routledge.
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  8. What is a Photographic Register?Dawn M. Wilson - forthcoming - Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism.
    This Discussion Piece is a response to Mark Windsor's Discussion Piece (2023) 'Photographic Registers are Latent Images', which is a response to my article, (2021) 'Invisible Images and Indeterminacy: Why we need a Multi-stage Account of Photography' JAAC 79(2) 161-174.. -/- I argue that a photosensitive surface does not produce invisible pictorial features when it is exposed to light, and conclude, contra Windsor, that a photographic register is not a latent image. I argue that Windsor does not succeed in defending (...)
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  9. Photographic Registers are Latent Images.Mark Windsor - forthcoming - The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism.
    In a recent article, Dawn Wilson (2021) has argued against single-stage accounts of photography by arguing against the latent photographic images upon which those accounts depend. Concomitantly, she argues that the only viable account of photography is multi-stage. Unlike single-stage accounts, multi-stage accounts do not postulate the existence of photographic images of any kind prior to development. Rather, according to multi-stage accounts, photographs are produced from “photographic registers.” In this Discussion Piece, I defend single-stage accounts by arguing that Wilson’s rejection (...)
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  10. The Original in the Digital Age.Doron Avital & Karolina Dolanska - 2023 - Espes. The Slovak Journal of Aesthetics 12 (1):88-107.
    In 2021, an NFT of a digital artwork by the artist @beeple was sold for $69 million. This sale is the starting point for a logical-historical journey tracing the fate of the Original in the digital age. We follow the footsteps of two seminal works exploring the concept of the Original, the celebrated The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction by Walter Benjamin and Nelson Goodman’s book, Languages of Art. We examine two case studies: the Lost Leonardo (...)
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  11. The Narrative Characteristics of Images.Hannah Fasnacht - 2023 - British Journal of Aesthetics 63 (1):1-23.
    While much has been written about verbal narratives, we still lack a clear account of what makes images narrative. I argue that there are narrative characteristics of images and show this with examples of single images. The argument proceeds in three steps. First, I propose that from a semantic perspective, the following two characteristics are necessary for an image to be narrative: a representation of an event and a representation of time. Second, I argue that there are paradigmatic characteristics, such (...)
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  12. Seeing One Another Anew with Godfrey Reggio's Visitors.Eran Guter & Inbal Guter - 2023 - In Craig Fox & Britt Harrison (eds.), Philosophy of Film Without Theory. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.
    Visitors is a hybrid art film fusing photography and music into a complex abstract texture for the attention of the viewer. It is also a requiem for our ‘New Order for the Ages’ in which humanity grows more and more technologically interconnected and communality means being alone together. We argue that Visitors can be experienced as a seeing aid designed to situate the viewer bewilderingly as needing to reacquire the capacity to see human beings as human beings. This is achieved (...)
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  13. Politische Landschaft (mit Burgruine): Ein Bilddokument von Identitätsdiskursen in Ostbelgien.Oliver Zöllner - 2023 - In Arvi Sepp & Lesley Penné (eds.), Ostbelgische Querverbindungen: Literarische Repräsentationen einer Grenzregion. Münster, New York: Waxmann. pp. 71-94.
    In his article "Political Landscape (with Castle Ruins): A Pictorial Document of Identity Discourses in East Belgium", Oliver Zöllner uses Ralf Bohnsack's (2013) "documentary method" to analyze a PR picture taken from a brochure of a regional authority as a pictorial document that encapsulates underlying discourses of identity, or rather identities in the plural, within the German-speaking Community of eastern Belgium, one of the three linguistic Communities of the federally organized kingdom. The analyzed image of a young woman in front (...)
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  14. L’arrêt de mort.Emmanuel Alloa - 2022 - Archives de Philosophie 85 (1):11-25.
    Promettant à la fois la capture de l’instant et son dépassement vers l’intemporel, le medium photographique voit son destin intimement lié à la catégorie du temps. L’article suggère cependant que cette inclusion du temps dans l’image s’est acquise, au cours de l’histoire de la photographie, au prix d’une essentialisation du momentané. À rebours d’une telle approche, il s’agit de repenser l’instantané photographique comme découlant de l’accident, si bien que la photo figure non plus l’instant fécond, mais bien le temps de (...)
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  15. Relieve de Cine en Relieve.Bernd Behr - 2022 - Philosophy of Photography 13 (1):165-173.
    This series of images forms part of the ongoing project Soft Ground, Hard Light, which speculates on a multiscalar spatial ontology of photography emanating from the Arditurri silver mine complex in the Basque Country. Evoking the mountainous massif around Arditurri where silver ore and galena have been extracted since Roman presence in the area, the depicted topographies are, in fact, data transcriptions from atomic force microscopy (AFM) probing the analogue film stock of an early 1930s experiment in 3D cinema, Cine (...)
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  16. To scan a memory: On Anouk De Clercq’s LiDAR film Thing.Martine Beugnet - 2022 - Philosophy of Photography 13 (1):135-151.
    LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) is a remote sensing technology. It needs no ambient light, nor the guidance of the human eye to capture and reproduce a likeness of the world around us. Although LiDAR generates a constant stream of technical literature, LiDAR images, once envisaged for their aesthetic and expressive value, seem to call for alternative modes of analysis. How do we approach the fast-expanding archive of scanner images? How do we adequately describe the intriguing, spectral visualizations that its (...)
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  17. Life Through a Lens.Dan Cavedon-Taylor - 2022 - In Sophie Archer (ed.), Salience: A Philosophical Inquiry. Routledge.
    Kantian disinterest is the view that aesthetic judgement is constituted (at least in part) by a form of perceptual contemplation that is divorced from concerns of practical action. That view, which continues to be defended to this day, is challenged here on the basis that it is unduly spectator-focussed, ignoring important facets of art-making and its motivations. Beauty moves us, not necessarily to tears or rapt contemplation, but to practical action; crucially, it may do so as part and parcel of (...)
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  18. Pureness or corruption: Spectres and ghosts between photography and X-rays.Martin Charvát - 2022 - Philosophy of Photography 13 (1):99-118.
    This article investigates the paradoxical nature of cameraless photography. Born after the invention of early photography, the camera apparatus is clearly a precondition of the idea and practice of cameraless photography (photography made without a camera). Yet, at the same time, cameraless photography is situated as a form of pure photography, giving rise to the idea that the spirit of photography lies somewhere beyond the mediation of the camera. This article approaches the paradoxical nature of cameraless photography in an indirect (...)
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  19. A Black Gaze: Artists Changing How We See, Tina M. Campt (2021).Flora Dunster - 2022 - Philosophy of Photography 13 (2):307-313.
    Review of: A Black Gaze: Artists Changing How We See, Tina M. Campt (2021) Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 232 pp., ISBN 978-0-26204-587-2, h/bk, $29.95 Dark Mirrors, Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa (2021) London: Mack Books, 240 pp., ISBN 978-1-91362-039-4, p/bk, £25.00.
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  20. Reconsidering cameraless photography.Tomáš Dvořák - 2022 - Philosophy of Photography 13 (1):3-15.
    This article introduces the Special Issue on cameraless photography and the translation of Georg Christoph Lichtenberg’s treatise on electrical figures. It summarizes previous discussions on cameraless photography, namely those by Geoffrey Batchen and suggests relating the photogram to current post-lenticular technologies such as radiography, digital scanning or machine vision. It outlines the emergence of cameraless imaging in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century scientific research, taking Lichtenberg’s figures as an emblem of automatically generated images situated between duration and instantaneity, between image (...)
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  21. Life and death in the production of a Factographic object.Andrew Fisher - 2022 - Philosophy of Photography 13 (2):255-273.
    This article focuses on documents made by the Soviet military secret service detailing the arrest, interrogation, trial and execution of Sergei Tret’iakov in Moscow in 1937. The original documents were published in Russian in 1997 as part of Return my Freedom, a collection of archival records edited by Vladimir Kolyazin that details the fate of Russian and German cultural figures who fell victim to the Stalinist terror. This record of Tret’iakov’s violent death has received little attention, even in Russia or (...)
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  22. Shot/countershot: Essaying images of war and violence in the work of Harun Farocki, Hito Steyerl and Rabih Mroué.Alex Fletcher - 2022 - Philosophy of Photography 13 (2):231-253.
    This article examines the work of three artists – Harun Farocki, Hito Steyerl and Rabih Mroué – who in different ways mobilize the cinematic device of ‘shot/countershot’ in two distinct post-cinematic contexts (the moving image installation and the performance lecture) as a tool for scrutinizing images of war and violence from divergent historical, socio-economic, geopolitical and ethical perspectives. In returning to and reworking this classical cinematic device as an experimental and essayistic mode of montage and critical reflection, all three artists, (...)
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  23. Street Photography Ethics.John Hadley - 2022 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 25 (4):529-540.
    In this paper I examine the ethics of street photography. I firstly discuss the close-up ‘in-your-face’ style street photography made famous by American photographer, Bruce Gilden. In close-up street photography, the proximity of the camera to the subject and the element of surprise work in tandem to produce a striking and evocative picture. Close-up street photography is shown to be ethically contentious on wellbeing-related and autonomy-related grounds. I next examine the more orthodox ‘respectable distance’ kind of street photography. In orthodox (...)
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  24. Pechblende.Susanne Kriemann - 2022 - Philosophy of Photography 13 (1):61-74.
    Bringing together an assemblage of archival materials, photo documents, literature and found objects, Pechblende investigates concepts of scale, proximity and distance in relation to radioactivity and the body. Centred on the highly radioactive and uranium-rich mineral pitchblende (German: Pechblende), the work traces a history of scientific and photographic processes narrated through the interconnected sites of laboratory, archive, museum and mine. Pitchblende was mined in the Ore Mountains of the former German Democratic Republic between 1946 and 1989. Today, the former mining (...)
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  25. Negative.Jimmy Lee - 2022 - Philosophy of Photography 13 (2):275-287.
    This publication presents a selection from ‘Negative’: a landscape project on the aftermath of the recent political unrest in Hong Kong.
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  26. Spiritualism and the material performance of cameraless photography: Notes on and around a séance with Eusapia Palladino.Nicoletta Leonardi - 2022 - Philosophy of Photography 13 (1):75-97.
    This article examines the cameraless negatives revealing the imprints of four fingers obtained in Turin in February 1907 during the second of two séances with renowned medium Eusapia Palladino organized by physiologists Alberto Aggazzotti, Carlo Foà and Amedeo Hertlizka. By looking at the material and performative components of the séance, it presents spiritualist cameraless photography as a productive tool for rethinking and reframing the photographic medium from a cross-disciplinary perspective questioning medium specific histories and dominant genealogies.
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  27. First treatise containing general experiments on a new method for researching the nature and movement of electrical matter presented at the public meeting of the Royal Society of Sciences on 21 February 1778.Georg Christoph Lichtenberg - 2022 - Philosophy of Photography 13 (1):17-34.
    This text was first published as ‘De nova methodo naturam ac motum fluidi electrici investigandi’ in Novi Commentarrii Societatis Regiae Scientiarum Gottingensis. Commentationes physicae et mathematicae classis 8 (Göttingen 1778: 168–80). It also appeared in a printing by Joann Christian Dieterich in Göttingen in 1778. Lichtenberg delivered this talk personally to the Royal Society of Sciences in Göttingen on 21 February 1778. Although Lichtenberg was not present, he had already informed the Royal Society of Lichtenberg’s discovery of the electrical figures (...)
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  28. Photographing hyperobjects: The non-human temporality of autoradiography.Olga Moskatova - 2022 - Philosophy of Photography 13 (1):119-133.
    In the aftermath of the Fukushima power plant disaster, autoradiography became an increasingly widespread artistic technique for producing cameraless photography. By exposing photographic film directly using contaminated objects and materials, contemporary artists autoradiograph the geopolitics and local histories of atomic contamination due to bombing, testing, nuclear reactor explosions, mining or uranium disposal cells. In my article, I discuss the implications these autoradiographic works have for the concept of photography by drawing on Timothy Morton’s notion of hyperobjects. Being hyperobjective, radioactivity confronts (...)
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  29. Fotografie: Moralischer Blick oder ästhetische Distanz?Nicola Mößner - 2022 - In Hauke Behrendt & Jakob Steinbrenner (eds.), Kunst und Moral: Eine Debatte über die Grenzen des Erlaubten. Berlin, Boston: de Gruyter. pp. 219-242.
    Photography: morally close or aesthetically removed? Can photographs make a contribution to the moral discourse? And, if so, what kind of contribution might that be? On the one hand, they are often used in morally laden contexts of communication such as media reports about wars etc. On the other, it is said that images are inherently ambiguous which seems to speak against the possibility to use them as a means to communicate focused moral judgements. The following article starts with a (...)
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  30. Loss of vision: On emotional affects caused by the representation of violence in Russia’s war against Ukraine and beyond.Mykola Ridnyi - 2022 - Philosophy of Photography 13 (2):289-300.
    The essay is concentrated on emotional affects caused by representation of violence in the case of Russia’s war against Ukraine and beyond. Instant accessibility to first-hand visual information created fertile soil for planting and then multiplying manipulative strategies of one or another political interest. Meanwhile, the demand for shocking content continues to steadily rise because it guarantees popularity, spectacle and even a form of pleasure. This, in turn, supports a very propagandistic version of reality where violence plays a central role (...)
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  31. On the photographic status of images produced by generative adversarial networks (GANs).Antonio Somaini - 2022 - Philosophy of Photography 13 (1):153-164.
    The text analyses the new images produced by artificial neural networks such as Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) from the perspective of photography and, more specifically, cameraless photography. The images produced by GANs are located within the wider framework of the impact of machine learning technologies on contemporary visual culture and contemporary artistic practices. In the final section, the article focuses on the work of two artists who have explicity tackled the relations between GAN-generated images and the traditions of photography and (...)
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  32. Killing for Show: Interview with Julian Stallabrass.Julian Stallabrass, Alex Fletcher & Andrew Fisher - 2022 - Philosophy of Photography 13 (2):183-205.
    This interview with the art historian and curator Julian Stallabrass was conducted by Alex Fletcher and Andrew Fisher over the winter of 2022–23. It takes as its point of departure Stallabrass’s recent and large-scale study Killing for Show: Photography, War, and the Media in Vietnam and Iraq (2020), in order to consider the changing ways in which images have been used to both document and to wage war. The interview explores Stallabrass’s central historical contrast between photography in the Iraq and (...)
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  33. Landscape and autopsy: Photography and the natural history of capital.Alberto Toscano - 2022 - Philosophy of Photography 13 (2):213-229.
    This article takes inspiration from Allan Sekula’s remarks on New Topographics photography, as well as his own ‘geography lessons’, to interrogate how photographs of ‘man-altered landscapes’ give visual form to the problems of temporality, natural history and historical agency that mark life in the Capitalocene. It proposes that combining Fredric Jameson’s analysis of the way that capital congeals ‘quantities of the past’ into dead labour with Andreas Malm’s diagnosis of our ‘warming condition’ allows us both to diagnose and counter the (...)
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  34. Toward the Critique of Violence: A Critical Edition, Walter Benjamin, Peter Fenves (ed.) and Julia Ng (ed.) (2021).Sebastian Truskolaski - 2022 - Philosophy of Photography 13 (2):301-306.
    Review of: Toward the Critique of Violence: A Critical Edition, Walter Benjamin, Peter Fenves (ed.) and Julia Ng (ed.) (2021) Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 368 pp., ISBN 978-0-80474-952-7, h/bk, $25.00.
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  35. Portraits, Facial Perception, and Aspect-Seeing.Andreas Vrahimis - 2022 - British Journal of Aesthetics 62 (1):85–100.
    Is there a substantial difference between a portrait depicting the sitter’s face made by an artist and an image captured by a machine able to simulate the neuro-physiology of facial perception? Drawing on the later Wittgenstein, this paper answers this question by reference to the relation between seeing a visual pattern as (i) a series of shapes and colours, and (ii) a face with expressions. In the case of the artist, and not of the machine, the portrait’s creative process involves (...)
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  36. Kinemorphic cursives: Self-imaging and the non-mimetic source of photoimaging.Christophe Wall-Romana - 2022 - Philosophy of Photography 13 (1):35-59.
    The motive for late eighteenth-century proto-technics of photography and cinema was never quite mimetic representation: it was generating autonomous impressions of natural phenomena within the tradition ofNaturphilosophie. The article analyses a series of connections between ‘natural hieroglyphs’ (von Lichtenberg), Jacques-Alexandre-César Charles’s ‘megascope’, Wedgwood’s pre-photography, Lavater’s silhouettes and antecedents of Marey’s ‘graphic method’. The goal is to document precursor ideas, devices, setups and frameworks of photoimaging medias to show that the genealogy of photography and cinema intersected through many polymath transverses within (...)
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  37. Against Imprinting: The Photographic Image as a Source of Evidence.Dawn M. Wilson - 2022 - Social Research: An International Quarterly 89 (4):947-969.
    A photographic image is said to provide evidence of a photographed scene because it is a causal imprint of reflected light, an indexical trace of real objects and events. Though widely established in the history, theory, and philosophy of photography, this traditional imprinting model must be rejected because it relies on a “single-stage” misconception of the photographic process: the idea that a photographic image comes into existence at the time of exposure. In its place, a “multistage” account properly articulates different (...)
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  38. Photography after Capitalism, Ben Burbridge (2020). [REVIEW]Dan Commons - 2021 - Philosophy of Photography 12 (1):171-174.
    Review of: Photography after Capitalism, Ben Burbridge (2020) London: Goldsmiths Press, 240 pp., ISBN 978-1-91268-599-8, h/bk, £34.00.
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  39. Feminism and Art in Postwar Italy: The Legacy of Carla Lonzi, Francesco Ventrella and Giovanna Zapperi (eds) (2020). [REVIEW]Luisa Lorenza Corna - 2021 - Philosophy of Photography 12 (1):167-170.
    Review of: Feminism and Art in Postwar Italy: The Legacy of Carla Lonzi, Francesco Ventrella and Giovanna Zapperi (eds) (2020) London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 296 pp., ISBN 978-1-78453-732-6, h/bk, £95.00.
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  40. Afterimages and the synaesthesia of photography.Kelann Currie-Williams - 2021 - Philosophy of Photography 12 (1):111-127.
    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 (...)
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  41. Pragmatic Saintliness: Toward a Criticism and Celebration of Community.Benjamin Davis - 2021 - Contemporary Pragmatism 1 (18):72-94.
    This essay responds to John McDermott’s diagnosis of politics and religious life in the U.S.: “[B]oth traditional political and religious institutions are no longer an adequate let alone rich resource for a celebratory language.” I present a new celebratory language by reading William James’s description of saintliness in Varieties of Religious Experience. James gives me the resources to naturalize and democratize saintliness. Distinguished not by her transcendent miracles but by her this-worldly energies and experiments, the pragmatic saint remakes the experience (...)
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  42. The Narrative Aesthetics of Protest Images.Hannah Fasnacht - 2021 - Jolma the Journal for the Philosophy of Language, Mind and the Arts 2 (1):212-238.
    In this paper I argue that protest images have a certain aesthetics and a degree of transformative power. Crucial to this aesthetics is the images’ narrative struc- ture, like the representation of goal-directed actions. On this basis, I show that there are more aspects that contribute to the storytelling capacity, like narrative characteristics and an aesthetics of dramatization. Using the example of climate change protests as a case study, I establish that these aspects can contribute to the transformative ability of (...)
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  43. Just a Mess. Définitions Analogies Dialectiques.Filippo Fimiani - 2021 - Parigi, Francia: Mimesis. Edited by Antonio Somaini Francesco Casetti.
    The paper leans on a movie cult from the 1960s, Blow-Up (1966) by Michelangelo Antonioni, of which a famous sequence is often mentioned, the one in which the protagonist, the photographer Thomas (considered here as a "conceptual character"), repeatedly enlarged the photographs he made in a park, in order to find an answer to the mystery surrounding the murder of a man: magnification which leads, on the one hand, to a gradual loss of definition of images, with the grain of (...)
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  44. The promise of photography: Scale, measure and proportion in a conflicted visual milieu.Andrew Fisher, Anke Hennig, Bernd Behr, Daniel Rubinstein, Martin Charvát, Peter Szendy & Tomáš Dvořák - 2021 - Philosophy of Photography 12 (1):27-69.
    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 (...)
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  45. Topologies of Air and the Airspace Tribunal: Shona Illingworth and Anthony Downey.Shona Illingworth & Anthony Downey - 2021 - Philosophy of Photography 12 (1):7-25.
    Can we deploy creative practices to critically address the fatal interlocking of global surveillance technologies, neo-colonial expansionism, environmental degradation and the lethal threat of drone warfare? Throughout the following conversation, Shona Illingworth and Anthony Downey examine these and other questions in relation to the recent publication of Topologies of Air (Sternberg Press and The Power Plant, 2022). Edited by Downey, the book includes discussion and documentation of two major bodies of work by Illingworth, including Topologies of Air (2021) and Lesions (...)
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  46. Seeing Through Photographs: Photography as a Transparent Visual Medium.Vivian Mizrahi - 2021 - Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 79 (1):52-63.
    The idea that looking at a photograph is akin to face-to-face perception and that photographs provide genuine perceptual access to the objects they depict was notoriously defended by Kendall Walton in “Transparent Pictures.” Walton’s main thesis is that photographs are transparent in the sense that we can see objects through them. The main goal of this article is to support Walton’s view by providing a full account of photographic transparency. I will argue that the transparency that characterizes photography is not (...)
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  47. Jpegs: Thomas Ruff and the horror of digital photography.Ian Rothwell - 2021 - Philosophy of Photography 12 (1):93-109.
    This article analyses the aesthetics of digital compression as revealed in Thomas Ruff’s Jpegs series of photographs (2004–07). These images exhibit a poor standard of digital picture resolution fixed as large-scale, high-quality, lustrous C-type photographic prints. With reference to Vilém Flusser’s writing on photography, I argue that Ruff’s work discloses a ‘horror of digital photography’: a system of automated representation, which inverts our relationship to the photographic image.
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  48. Object-oriented photography: A speculative essay on the photography of essence.Bob Ryan & Alison Price - 2021 - Philosophy of Photography 12 (1):129-147.
    In this article, we discuss the insights object-oriented ontology (OOO) offers in understanding the photographic process. Following Kant’s distinction between noumena and phenomena and Heidegger’sGeviert, Harman’s OOO focuses on the real versus sensory aspects of all objects of experience. In our analysis, we explore its implications for intentionality, signification and revelation in photography. OOO locates being within all objects and stands in opposition to the post-Cartesian correlationism influential in the continental tradition. In Heidegger’s terms, the still camera exhibits both presence (...)
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  49. Picturing Place: Photography and the Geographical Imagination.Joan Schwartz & James Ryan - 2021 - Routledge.
    The advent of photography opened up new worlds to 19th century viewers, who were able to visualize themselves and the world beyond in unprecedented detail. But the emphasis on the photography's objectivity masked the subjectivity inherent in deciding what to record, from what angle and when. This text examines this inherent subjectivity. Drawing on photographs that come from personal albums, corporate archives, commercial photographers, government reports and which were produced as art, as record, as data, the work shows how the (...)
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  50. Transparency and Egocentrism.Nils-Hennes Stear - 2021 - In Sonia Sedivy (ed.), Art, Representation, and Make-Believe: Essays on the Philosophy of Kendall L. Walton. New York, NY, USA: pp. 196-213.
    Kendall Walton argues that photographs are transparent; we literally see the things depicted in them, not just the depictions. This intriguing claim has endured numerous criticisms from those I call the ‘egocentrists’, according to whom seeing—literal seeing—requires the conveyance of egocentric information; to count as seeing something, a visual experience of that thing must impart some information, however spare, about its position relative to the viewer. Since photographs fail to convey such information, the egocentrists claim, Walton’s transparency thesis fails. This (...)
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