Papers
Shot in the Dark: Notes on Photography, Causality & Content
penultimate draft; final version forthcoming in Philosophical Quarterly
Photography is often said to be an essentially causal medium. In this paper I argue that a causal theory of photography does not, as Roy Sorensen would have it, force us to say that images of backlit objects are photographs of the back surfaces of the said objects. Rather, such images, I suggest, are photographs of the objects and what Alva Noë would call their “looks.” I also express some doubts as to the role Noë ascribes to looks in perception, while arguing that an analogous role is exactly right in photography – in particular, that “looks” furnish us with a way to move closer to an answer to the question of the appropriate causal relation in photography.
Download (.pdf) Seeing What Is Not There: Pictorial Experience, Imagination and Non-localization
preprint; final version published in The British Journal of Aesthetics, 51:3 (2011), pp. 279-294.
Pictures let us see what is not there. Or rather, since what pictures depict is not really there, we do not really see the things they are pictures of. But we seem to see the depicted things. As we say, we "see" them "in" the picture. Ever since Richard Wollheim introduced the notion of seeing-in into philosophical aesthetics, as part of his theory of depiction, there has been a lively debate about how, precisely, to understand this experience. However, one (alleged) feature of seeing-in that Wollheim pointed to has been almost completely absent in the subsequent discussion, namely that seeing-in allows for non-localization. When looking at a picture, says Wollheim, there is not always an answer to the question of where one sees a certain thing in a picture. And if Wollheim is right in this, pictures indeed let us see what is not there: we see things in pictures, but there is no ‘there’ where we see those things. In this paper I argue against Wollheim’s claim that object-seeing-in allows for non-localization. But there is, I argue, a pictorial experience, which is closely tied to seeing-in and which is non-localized, namely (what I call) pictorial perceptual presence.
Depictive Traces: On the Phenomenology of Photography
preprint; final version published in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 69:2 (2011), pp. 185-196.
Ever since their invention, photographic images have often been thought to be a special kind of image. Often, photography has been claimed to be a particularly realistic medium. At other times, photographs are said to be epistemically superior to other types of image. Yet another way in which photographs apparently are special is that our subjective experience of looking at photographs seems very different from our experience of looking at other types of image, such as paintings and drawings. While the other seemingly distinctive aspects of photography have been quite thoroughly discussed in the literature, theories of the experience of photography, or in other words, theories of its special phenomenology, are less common. To be sure, the phenomenon has often been pointed out and described, but explanations of the phenomenology of photography are rare. In this paper, I attempt an explanation of at least part of the phenomenology of photography by appealing to the idea, borrowed from André Bazin, that a photograph is a certain kind of trace. Along the way, it is also argued that Kendall Walton's so called “transparency thesis” cannot give a plausible explanation of the phenomenology associated with looking at photographs.
