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The Real Challenge to Photography (as Communicative Representational Art)
Abstract
I argue that authentic photography is not able to develop to the full as a communicative representational art. Photography is authentic when it is true to its self-image as the imprinting of images. For an image to be imprinted is for its content to be linked to the scene in which it originates by a chain of sufficient, mind-independent causes. Communicative representational art (in any medium: photography, painting, literature, music, etc.) is art that exploits the resources of representation to achieve artistically interesting communication of thought. The central resources of representation are content, vehicle properties, and the interplay between these two. Whereas painting and other representational arts are able to exploit all three to communicate thought, authentic photography can exploit interplay only to a very limited degree. However, the exploitation of interplay is the culmination of communicative representational art: the natural endpoint in its development.
... A sub-part of this process is the visualization part, that is, that part of the making process that pertains to the physical realization of the picture's content. Indeed, as Hopkins (2015) for instance has pointed out, some physical features of pictures do not matter for the determination of the picture's content, as they can vary independently of the latter (e.g., the physical provenance of the colors used, the size of the canvas, its location, etc.). In this paper, I shall mainly focus on the visualization part of the making process. ...
... Indeed, the way we interpret the content of these kind of pictures is similar to the way we interpret utterances in communication. Note, however, that Gaut (2010) and Hopkins (2015) both connect the issue of intentional control over the production process of pictures to communication in a similar way as Newall's (2011), but unlike him, they think that videos and photographs can also communicate thought through the intentional modifications of the picture's vehicle we saw above (e.g., through the selection of camera angle in movies, Gaut, 2010: p. 43). If communication is available through photographs, even though it might not be paradigmatic of how photographs they are used, in what way the intentional standard of correctness would be saliently linked to communication? ...
In this paper, I present an analysis of the depictive properties of deepfakes. These are videos and pictures produced by deep learning algorithms that automatically modify existing videos and photographs or generate new ones. I argue that deepfakes have an intentional standard of correctness. That is, a deepfake depicts its subject only insofar as its creator intends it to. This is due to the way in which these images are produced, which involves a degree of intentional control similar to that involved in the production of other intentional pictures such as drawings and paintings. This aspect distinguishes deepfakes from real videos and photographs, which instead have a non-intentional standard: their correct interpretation corresponds to the scenes that were recorded by the mechanisms that produced them, and not to what their producers intended them to represent. I show that these depictive properties make deepfakes fit for communicating information in the same way as language and other intentional pictures. That is, they do not provide direct access to the communicated information like non-intentional pictures (e.g., videos and photographs) do. Rather, they convey information indirectly, relying only on the viewer's assumptions about the communicative intentions of the creator of the deepfake. Indirect communication is indeed a prominent function of such media in our society, but it is often overlooked in the philosophical literature. This analysis also explains what is epistemically worrying about deepfakes. With the introduction of this technology, viewers interpreting photorealistic videos and pictures can no longer be sure of which standard to select (i.e., intentional or non-intentional), which makes misinterpretation likely (i.e., they can take an image to have a standard of correctness that it does not have).
There is a sustained phenomenological tradition of describing the character of photographic pictorial experience to consist in part of a feeling of contact with the subject of the photograph. Philosophers disagree, however, about the exact cause of the ‘contact phenomenon’ and whether there is a difference in the phenomenal character between the pictorial experiences of photographs and handmade pictures so that, if a viewer mistakes the type that a token image belongs to, their sense of contact can alter. I argue that the contact phenomenon is contingent upon, and triggered by, the viewer’s perceptual experience of the image, which may be subject to change depending upon how a viewer attends to an image. I develop a hybrid account to resolve how the perceptual and cognitive aspects of a viewer’s experience interact and produce the complex phenomenology, including conflicting mental states, that a viewer can undergo during the described experiences.
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 which I argue that causal registration of light is not equivalent to recording and reproducing an image. Intervention or non-intervention by photographers is more sophisticated than the traditional view allows. Using the multi-stage account, I describe four models for producing photographic images and pictures.
In The Real Challenge to Photography (as a communicative representational art), Robert Hopkins claims that a particular and significant kind of photography – what he calls ‘authentic’ photography – cannot exploit the same range of resources as non-photographic images when it comes to communicating thoughts. In this paper, I question this claim by raising concerns regarding the conditions Hopkins poses for something to qualify as communication of thoughtand, more importantly, by arguing that there are indeed techniques in ‘authentic’ photography that allow the artist to exploit the vehicle properties of the medium independently of the content
photographs;artistic representation;photographer;geometrical properties;photographic image
When we look at photographs we literally see the objects that they are of. But seeing photographs as photographs engages aesthetic interests that are not engaged by seeing the objects that they are of. These claims appear incompatible. Sceptics about photography as an art form have endorsed the first claim in order to show that there is no photographic aesthetic. Proponents of photography as an art form have insisted that seeing things in photographs is quite unlike seeing things face‐to‐face. This paper argues that the claims are compatible. While seeing things in photographs is quite unlike seeing things face‐to‐face, nevertheless seeing things in photographs is one way of seeing things. The differences between seeing things by means of photographs and by means of the naked eye provide the elements of an account of the aesthetic interests photographs engage.
Jeff Wall: Picture for Women
- David Campany
Campany, David. (2011) Jeff Wall: Picture for Women. Afterall Books.
Die Kunst der Leerstelle: Sprachlosigkeit als Voraussetzung der Verständigung
- Ludger Schwarte
Schwarte, Ludger. (2008) 'Die Kunst der Leerstelle: Sprachlosigkeit als Voraussetzung der
Verständigung'. In Barbara Gronau and Alice Lagaay (eds.), Performanzen des Nicht-Tuns
(Vienna: Passagen), 33-44.