Dawn Melissa WilsonUniversity of Hull · School of Politics and International Studies
Dawn Melissa Wilson
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Publications (13)
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” misconcep...
Photography is valued as a medium for recording and visually reproducing features of the world. I seek to challenge the view that photography is fundamentally a recording process and that every photograph is a record—a view that I claim is based on a ‘single-stage’ misconception of the process. I propose an alternative, ‘multi-stage’ account in whi...
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 phot...
According to Roger Scruton, it is not possible for photographs to be representational art. Most responses to Scruton's scepticism are versions of the claim that Scruton disregards the extent to which intentionality features in photography; but these cannot force him to give up his notion of the ideal photograph. My approach is to argue that Scruton...
The study of photography is a fast-changing and multifarious enquiry with philosophical significance in aesthetics, art, epistemology, ethics, semiotics and image theory. The object of study is not simply 'the photograph', but a group of evolving practices: primarily the production, storage, distribution and viewing of photographic images. Photogra...
The puzzle that concerns me is whether it is possible to establish a substantive difference between photographic images and other kinds of visual image, which can explain the special epistemic and aesthetic qualities of photographs, without giving way to scepticism about photographic art. In this essay I offer a philosophical account of the photogr...
In the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus Wittgenstein appeals to clarity when he characterises the aim, task and results of philosophy. In this essay I suggest that his ‘picture theory’ of language implies that clarity has aesthetic significance in philosophical work. Wittgenstein claims that the task of philosophy is to make thoughts clear. In the ‘p...
It has been argued that photographs are unsuitable or inferior candidates for art because they are not intimately bound to the mind of an artist. I believe that we can address scepticism in the philosophy of art only if we recognise that it is linked to dogmatism in the epistemology of photography. This is the motivation for the present article. I...
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 opposition...
In the Preface to his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Wittgenstein claims that the problems of philosophy are posed ‘because the logic of our language is misunderstood’ (p. 3).He makes it clear that it is not the task of a philosopher to interfere with the logic of language, as ‘logic must look after itself’ (5.473; cf. 5.4731). Nor is it necessary...
In ‘Photography and Representation’, Roger Scruton presented a powerful and provocative sceptical position. For most people interested in the aesthetics of photography, this paper represents an important challenge and, over the last twenty years, the many responses have created a rich body of literature. I shall not attempt to survey this literatur...
In both the Tractatus and the Investigations, Wittgenstein claimed that the aim of philosophy is to achieve clarity: to see clearly the logic or grammar of our language. However, his view of clarity underwent an important change, one of many changes that led Wittgenstein to write, in the preface to the Investigations, that his new ideas "could be s...