Arts, Agents, Artifacts- Photography's Automatisms

The University of Chicago Presshttp://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/667422 .

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

The University of Chicago Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to CriticalInquiry.

http://www.jstor.org

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=ucpress

http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/667422?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

Arts, Agents, Artifacts: Photography’sAutomatisms

Patrick Maynard

1. Two Modern ArtifactsThe appearance of the idea of the fine arts seems to precede photog-

raphy by barely eighty years. Thus Johann Wolfgang von Goethe couldreact to it as a mediocre neologism, the product of philosophical hacks:

It occurred to someone who reasoned poorly that certain humanpastimes and joys, which imitators devoid of genius had turned into toiland laboriousness, could be classified for purposes of theoretical trickeryunder the rubric “fine arts.” And so they now stand in philosophical text-books, but only out of mental laziness, being in fact no more closely re-lated than the seven “liberal arts” of the old seminaries.

The year of this remark, 1772, was about the time that chemist Carl Scheele,discoverer of oxygen, was spreading silver salts on surfaces, hoping to takeadvantage of the discovery that they darken in the presence of light. IndeedGoethe prefaced his remark with an ironic analogy to a magic lantern: to thesearts as “projected through a common aperture to dance on the same whitewall, by the magic light of philosophy.”1 By the time the modern system of thearts appeared, photography’s optics were in place and its chemistry on the way.In time the fine arts idea caught on, and while its denotation has changed, itsmeaning and honorific use have proved remarkably resilient. This seems pos-sible because the idea consists of four components, in shifting, interacting—often conflicting—relationships, which may come and go as necessaryconditions. Each of these is explicit in the original eighteenth-century formu-lations as: (1) art (craft) in the production of (2) fine, beautiful (later, aesthetic)entities, usually (3) representational or mimetic (termed imitation), wherepractice of the craft calls on (4) mental powers of genius (imagination, origi-nality).2 Since we will have repeated reference to these, let us make a littlediagram that connects them. The order is immaterial.

1. Quoted in Paul Oskar Kristeller, “The Modern System of the Arts” (1951–1952), inAesthetics, trans. David Hills, ed. Susan L. Feagin and Patrick Maynard (New York, 1997), p. 382.See Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, review of The Fine Arts in Their Origins, Their True Natureand Their Best Application, by J. G. Sulzer, trans. Timothy Chamberlain, in Eighteenth-CenturyGerman Criticism, trans. and ed. Chamberlain (New York, 1992), pp. 175–79.

2. According to Kristeller, the first full, influential presentation of this idea was made byCharles Batteux; see Charles Batteux, “The Fine Arts Reduced to a Single Principle” (1746), in

Critical Inquiry 38 (Summer 2012)© 2012 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/12/3804-0011$10.00. All rights reserved.

727

That cannot be all. As Charles Stevenson argued, terms vary in time andplace along two dimensions: of cognitive content or meaning (such asthe diagram displays) and of “dynamic” meaning. 3 The expression OK,which came into use exactly when photography did, has little to dia-gram, though its dynamic usage has spread greatly. Many terms havelittle dynamic meaning. Thus the cognitive differences between grazeand browse or domesticated and tame are significant regarding animals,with important differences of extension over them, absent much dynamicmeaning. By contrast, the fine(r) arts, les beaux arts, die schönen Kunste, andso forth immediately assumed honorific dynamic uses that have persisted.4

By the time photography was introduced to the public at the end ofthe 1830s, the fine arts idea was already exhibiting resilience throughshifts of both extension and meaning. As to extension, one of Im-manuel Kant’s candidates, oratory, dropped out quickly. Music hasalways posed a problem for the mimesis constituent. In intension orcognitive meaning the components soon began internecine jostling,with shifting alliances—rather like ancient Athens, Sparta, Thebes, and

Aesthetics, trans. Robert Walters, pp. 102–4. The idea was dispersed by Denis Diderot’sEncyclopedie (1751–1772), notably in Jean le Rond d’Alembert’s Discours preliminaire (1751) andits later frontispiece.

3. See Charles L. Stevenson, Ethics and Language (New Haven, Conn., 1944).4. David Hume’s repeated use of the term finer arts in “Of the Standard of Taste” (1757)

expresses acceptance of the new grouping, whereas, for example, Benjamin Franklin’s pamphlet“A Proposal for Promoting Useful Knowledge among the British Plantations in America” (1743)pertained to the sciences.

P A T R I C K M A Y N A R D is emeritus professor of philosophy, University ofWestern Ontario. He is the author of The Engine of Visualization: Thinkingthrough Photography and Drawing Distinctions: The Varieties of GraphicExpression, and coeditor of Aesthetics (Oxford Readers).

728 Patrick Maynard / Arts, Agents, Artifacts

Persia. Famously, the mental-content constituent, arising from “ge-nius,” expanded in meaning and importance, at notable expense tocraft and mimesis—thus the emergence of romanticism, as a popularterm for creativity and self-expression. This is already well exemplifiedin John Stuart Mill’s 1833 essays on poetry and genius, which demotedcraft and deemphasized mimesis in favor of what he called “the expres-sion or uttering forth of feeling.”5 Thirteen years later, Edgar Allan Poeresponded with a craft-rhetoric put-down of genius and self-expression, although he later emphasized beauty.6 As for the aestheticcomponent, while Mill was willing to finesse a case for beauty in termsof self-expression, by the end of the century Leo Tolstoy’s self-expression approach in What Is Art? would banish Poe’s beauty fromthe answer as decadent hedonism. The pace did not slow in the twen-tieth century, when, leaping ahead, R. G. Collingwood explicitly de-moted craft in favor of expression, thereby taking down mimesis—aswere artists of the time—while Benedetto Croce placed beauty in themental expression of the beholder. We scarcely need reminding of whatcame next: the historic phase of aesthetic or formalist counterattacksagainst mimesis—later, even against self-expression—with which reli-gious thinkers such as Jacques Maritain had shown little patience fromthe start.

Beyond its multiple factors, the versatility of this eighteenth-centurymeme seems partly owing to the resources it affords for forming newcompounds, as shown in our little diagram. As can be seen by addingthe numbers of the diagram’s squares, the square’s corner points, thestraight lines and the triangles, four components provide fifteen com-binations of one, two, three, and four at a time, most of which havebeen realized in at least some visual fine arts conceptions. If thesecollections are also ordered to reflect general emphases, that numberincreases to sixty-five; and even more if variations within each compo-nent are introduced—for example, if genius is taken as applying topeoples or epochs (as by G. W. F. Hegel), not just individuals—or whenwithin a given component, as is often the case with the aesthetic, com-peting versions appear.

And so it is, at given times or places, that some permutations are for awhile ascendant, while others are only detectable in the background, but

5. John Stuart Mill, “What Is Poetry?” (1833), in Aesthetics, p. 162.6. See Edgar Allan Poe’s possibly satirical “The Philosophy of Composition” (1846) and

“The Poetic Principle” (1848), The Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. John H. Ingram, 3 vols.(Edinburgh, 1883), 3:266–78, 197–218.

Critical Inquiry / Summer 2012 729

no hegemony proves permanent.7 It was therefore not surprising when, inrecent decades, so-called conceptual arts reintroduced the idea of mentalexpression after a dominant period of aesthetic formalism—if only, onexhibition, to assume characteristic looks, thereby reintroducing aestheticfactors. That within photography large format work would of late empha-size representation is likewise not surprising. Thus in its practice, in criti-cism and history, the fine arts grouping suggests less an essence or a familyresemblance than a pinball game. Popular conceptions have proved some-what less volatile. Through almost three modern centuries of great change,the idea with its four components and honorific use, together with itsassociated terms—artist, artistic, creative, and so forth—remained re-markably stable for most people.

2. Nineteenth-Century NaysayingMeanwhile, what of that other modern artifact, photography? Pro-

pelled by continuous technological innovation and expanding markets, itsreinventions and changes of use have been steady, with no end in sight. Itwas photography’s mimetic, pictorial component that made it originally afine-art candidate. But photography also had an immediate effect on visualart’s mimetic component and has put its craft component under consid-erable pressure. Where the fine-arts idea seems to have held quite firm,however, is in its aesthetic and mentally expressive components. Thus, in1857, the art historian Lady Eastlake (Elizabeth Rigby) addressed “the ar-tistic part of our subject,” wondering “how far photography is really apicturesque agent.” Her aesthetic misgivings about a “falling off of artisticeffect” were less decisive than her skepticism about its mental component.“The power of selection and rejection,” she wrote, “the marriage of [theartist’s] mind with the object before him . . . the offspring, half stampedwith his own features half with those of Nature, which is born of theunion—whatever appertains to the free-will of the intelligent being, asopposed to the obedience of the machine,—this, and much more, consti-tutes that mystery called Art,” from which the mechanical nature of pho-tography bars it. 8 The mentally expressive component included under the“free-will” of agents has proved the most persistent source of resistance tophotography as fine art.

Not only does Eastlake’s judgment bring forward one of our main top-

7. Leo Tolstoy reintroduced “true” “beauty” later in What Is Art? trans. Aylmer Maude(New York, 1899), p. 23; Clive Bell tried to explain the significance of form in terms ofexpression, and so on.

8. Elizabeth Rigby, “Photography” (1857), in Classic Essays on Photography, ed. AlanTrachtenberg (New Haven, Conn., 1980), pp. 58, 51, 66; hereafter abbreviated “P.”


ics, agency, it serves as a valuable reminder about an ambiguity in another:the idea of automatism as self-acting. For her, in a historic age and place ofindustrialization, “mechanical” meant automatic, in the sense of causalprocesses working regularly towards appointed ends with a minimum ofhuman guidance—as “an unreasoning machine” (“P,” p. 64). This intro-duces the topic of chance. Chance operations are opposite to the mechan-ical or automatic. Machines were introduced not only to save labor butalso to leave less to chance (consider the Otis elevator, deployed in the veryyear of her essay). However, for Aristotle, in the age before machines, theterm automaton (self-action) implied chance. Indeed, in her aesthetic crit-icism Eastlake also brought out the medium’s strikingly accident-pronefeature, its lack of “power of selection and rejection,” with emphasis onphotography’s propensity for unnecessary surface texture and detail—thatis, noise (“P,” p. 66).9

Time has made aspects of Eastlake’s review appear dated. Her spe-cifically aesthetic reservations were soon overcome by technologicaladvances. As to expression, style features emerged even within the pho-tography of her contemporaries, distinctive of them and their media. Inwhat now seems a characteristic style, David Octavius Hill had made nu-merous salt-print calotypes of her in the decade before her review, while in1857 we easily perceive an array of mentalities in Oscar Gustave Rejlander’sTwo Ways of Life, works by his former student and soft-focus follower JuliaMargaret Cameron, Francis Frith’s Egyptian photographs, and prints bythe French scientist and photographer Victor-Henri Regnault.10 Still, inher essay Eastlake set out most of the issues concerning photographic artthat have accompanied photography’s fast-evolving history. As its repre-sentational reach expands and new aesthetics appear, there seem to berecurring qualms about the degree of its mental, hence intentional, content—what Eastlake termed “artistic feeling”—owing to the mechanical pro-cesses (“P,” p. 64). The reason is that intension, or cognitive content,presupposes intention, purposeful, or goal-directed action. But the latterseems compromised in the case of photography by automatism’s pinceraction. On one side, relevant aspects of the image may be there by chance,while on the other—owing to ever improving engineering design—by nat-ural powers. Accordingly, with each technological advance, new problems

9. Eastlake’s tactic is artistically to minimize image detail rendering as mere labor; see “P,”pp. 64–67.

10. Tintypes and the snapshot pistol camera were patented the year before Eastlake’s essay;besides Rejlander, Frith, and Cameron, Roger Fenton, Gustave Le Gray, and Henry PeachRobinson were at work; the next year Henry Fox Talbot patented photoengraving, and FelixNadar made a successful ambrotype from a balloon.


arise for viewers in locating the relevant intentions and thereby the mentalcontent in the space between these contraries. Digitalization, having intro-duced the newest chapters in this story, promises many more to come.

Why does this matter? Photography has never needed a fine arts label tomake its way. From its beginnings, most of what the nineteenth centurycalled its applications have had little to do with art. And aside from prac-tical uses, a steady stream of photo inventions, to which there seems noend, provides more and more “human pastimes and joys” to which, asGoethe remarked, the fine art label may be irrelevant. Closer to art, some ofthe most admired photographers have not cared whether their work isconsidered that way; some, such as Robert Capa and the later EdwardWeston, have resisted the label.11 Siegfried Kracauer suggested that we relaxthe “formative” components of fine arts in order to take in parts of pho-tography.12 Some consider photography to have surpassed, even replaced,the visual fine arts in our time. Others suggest that we enjoy photographicworks, and works using photography, not only without regard to theirbeing art but even to their being photographic, and there is surely merit inthat.

That the photographic art issue is not so simply resolved may be indi-cated by consulting our four components. Independent of any “modernsystem of the arts,” as Kristeller called it,13 each marks a matter of greatimportance. Records prove all societies to be concerned, in varying ex-tents, with matters of skill, mimesis, beauty, and self-expression (fig. 1).

During the post-1960s art period, paleoanthropology provided inde-pendent confirmation of the importance of each, and its combinations, byits criteria of what is termed behavioral modernity for the appearance ofmodern humans. These include high levels of culturally acquired andtransmitted skills, exhibiting signs of deep mental content, notably as ev-idenced by visual representations—with aesthetic factors counting heav-ily.14 This goes some way toward showing, generally, why the fine arts ideahas proved robust. Its components largely define our species.

11. For evidence, see Patrick Maynard, The Engine of Visualization: Thinking throughPhotography (Ithaca, N.Y., 1997), pp. 263–75.

12. Siegfried Kracauer, “Photography” (1960), in Classic Essays in Photography, p. 268.13. See Kristeller, “The Modern System of the Arts: A Study in the History of Aesthetics

(I),” Journal of the History of Ideas 12 (Oct. 1951): 496–27.14. From the American Museum of Natural History, Anne and Bernard Spitzer Hall of

Human Origins: “Over 30,000 years old, these images . . . provide some of the most powerfulearly evidence of symbolic thought. Archaeological evidence indicates that there was a ‘creativeexplosion’ of art, technology, culture and probably language at some time after about 40,000years ago.” “While some other species can solve problems and communicate with each other,only humans use symbols to re-create the world mentally and dream up endless new realities”(“What Makes Us Human,” American Museum of Natural History, www.amnh.org/exhibitions/


What of photography’s and the fine arts idea’s normative dimension?Could at least the honorific issue be eliminated? Many public museumstoday grapple with the problem of selection, exclusion, and interpretationof the fine arts, including photographic media.15 But, just as an individualcan retain only a few of his or her own artifacts, so too for any society,whether of hunter-gatherers, pastoral nomads, bronze-age farmers, ormodern urbanites. At some cost, we learn to live with the losses. The finearts largely denotes one class of keepers, and keeping entails investments of

permanent/humanorigins/human/language.php). Consider paleontologist Jean Clottes. Art,“based on the way in which humans distance themselves from and reconstruct the world,” is“the result of the projection of a strong mental image on the world, in order to interpret andtransform reality” (Jean Clottes, Cave Art [New York, 2008], p. 11).

15. For example, Madrid’s Reina Sofıa Museum’s collection “is intended to createintertwining narrations that take the form of archives.” There “aesthetic autonomy is diluted bythe inclusion—all on the same level—of documents, artwork, books, journals or photographs,thus giving rise to alternative narrations that give back to viewers knowledge, aestheticexperience and the possibility of comprehending a historical moment” (“Mission Statement,”Reina Sofia Museum, www.museoreinasofia.es/museo/mision_en.html). Modern times havebeen able to be more multicultural about its arts because they feature greater storage facilities,but there are limits.

F I G U R E 1 . Bison licking flank, ivory atlatl fragment, Magdalenian, fifteen- to twelve-thousand BP. American Museum of Natural History, New York.


wealth and effort. The much-contested question is which—includingwhich kinds—to keep. From the very first artwork until now, works areconsidered fine art because they are exemplary, mainly according to ourcomponents in their combinations. It may be said that here expressiontakes first place. For even anthropological critics of the arts label—notablyof Western ideas of beauty—hold that all societies mark out those well-designed artifacts of substance and action that make strikingly percep-tual—that is, expressive of—their defining cultural ideas, whatevertheir other functions.16 Like languages, religions, and other forms, fineart is a matter of cultural identity, the importance of which needs noarguing in our time.17 We could not avoid considering many photographicworks here.

3. “Photographic Art”Perhaps this historical perspective can help us begin to separate a

recent tangled pair of art impulses: those regarding antiart from artists’critical investigations of fine art’s different components. For example,regarding photography, some recent works have addressed aspects ofphotographic representation and aesthetics in popular media withouttouching issues of photographic fine art.18 Having noted the compo-nents of the idea of the fine arts and their variability, we are in a betterposition to see that challenges to the aesthetic in an art need not bechallenges to that art itself. These challenges may only reflect compet-itive aesthetics or conceptions of photographic art that put less weighton aesthetic matters. As we have seen, the fine arts grouping, like thegait of Eadweard Muybridge’s famous horse, moves along as differentcombinations of its four feet distribute its weight—even, given the in-ertia of its institutions, for brief periods when none do. Thus antiaestheticmovements need not be antiart; specifically, antiphotoaesthetics develop-ments need not be anti–photo art. Conversely, well-known rejections of pho-tographic fine art positions—notably from an art as craft basis—have notbeen antiaesthetic.19

Defenders of art photography have responded to such arguments in

16. See Clifford Geertz, “Art as a Cultural System” (1976), in Aesthetics, pp. 109–18, esp. p. 118.17. It is reasonable to debate how much of any group’s resources should be given to

preservation. Most production—certainly most photography—must be ephemeral. Yet mixedsocieties disagree about defining identities, a fact reflected in museum policies.

18. A notable conceptual art case in point was the exhibition, The Pictures Generation,1974–1984, on the “return to recognizable imagery, exploring how images shape our perceptionsof ourselves and the world” (“The Pictures Generation, 1974–1984,” Metropolitan Museum ofArt, 2009, www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2009/pictures-generation).

19. For example, see Peter Henry Emerson, The Death of Naturalistic Photography, in


terms of skill, aesthetics, and, primarily, self-expression—mainly bywhat may be called arguments from composition.20 Even over the lastfew decades, as photography has found a place in most museum col-lections, several distinctions seem worth keeping in mind. As men-tioned earlier, some of the conceptual gallery art of the recent periodhas used photographic images, or photography in mass media such astelevision and advertising, without being either itself photographic orconcerned with photographic fine art. Some artists attempt to make artout of existing photography by using “the non-art nature of photogra-phy as a new resource . . . for artistic practice.” Also “many artistsvalued photography in all the respects in which it seemed to evade,rather than mimic, art with a capital ‘A.’”21 But we must beware ofequivocation on the term photographic art. Art that exploits aspects ofphotographic use need not be photographic art. All arts exploit aspectsof other arts to make new ones, and the aspects of anything likely to beuseful to artists are often the nonessential.22 New art often consists inchanging the subject.

What of specifically photographic art in this period? It was making itsown way into private collections, galleries, museums, and the study of arthistory. To be sure, practice, exhibition, and criticism also addressed self-expression, skill, and aesthetics with a skepticism as pronounced as thenineteenth-century naysayers, if with less respect. Uneasiness about photoarts has tended to reveal an ongoing reservation about mental content. Letus consider one clear expression of a common form of recent reasoningagainst photographic fine art.

“Naturalistic Photography for Students of the Art” and “The Death of Naturalistic Photography”(1891; New York, 1973).

20. For compositional arguments, see Classic Essays on Photography, especially EdwardWeston, “Seeing Photographically,” pp. 169–75; Alfred Stieglitz, “Pictorical Photography,” pp.115–23; Paul Strand, “Photography and the New God,” pp. 141–51; and anon., “Is Photography aNew Art?” pp. 133–40. See also Robert Adams, Beauty in Photography: Essays in Defense ofTraditional Values (Millertown, N.Y., 1981).

21. “Aesthetics after Philosophy—2010 Conference,” Warwick Department of Philosophy,www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/philosophy/research/activities/aestheticsafterphotography/agencyandautomatism/. For a defense of beauty aesthetics, see Roger Seamon, “From The World IsBeautiful to The Family of Man: The Plight of Photography as a Modern Art,” Journal of Aestheticsand Art Criticism 55 (Summer 1997): 245–52. For a subsequent defense, see Adams, Beauty in Photog-raphy.

22. See Kirk Varnedoe, A Fine Disregard: What Makes Modern Art Modern (New York,1990).


4. Newer NaysayingA crucial example of photo-arts efforts within museums is a 1964

Museum of Modern Art exhibit, The Photographer’s Eye, and the cata-logue by its curator, John Szarkowski. To establish a particularly pho-tographic aesthetic, in support of his case for photo art, Szarkowskichose five aesthetic features, which, in order to illustrate, he mixedequal amounts of “vernacular” photographs with those by leading artphotographers. His catalogue opened: “This book is an investigation ofwhat photographs look like, and why they look that way.”23 Thereby,according to Janet Malcolm, the project backfired, proving to be “ashattering experience” for photo-art advocates, because it showed thatvernacular photos could be the “aesthetic peers” of alleged art photos,thus refuting the idea that “in the hands of a great talent [genius], andby dint of long study and extraordinary effort [craft], photography canovercome its mechanical nature and ascend to the level of art.” Sheadded that this impression was confirmed in the following decade,leading up to the conceptual period. In Malcolm’s account, photo-artadvocates’ responses took two main forms: ostriching by the “photog-raphy establishment”; and its “opposite,” rejection of a “masters ofphotography” approach through imitating the “most inartistic” of ver-nacular photography, amateur snapshots. However, the latter turnedout to be the “fake snapshot,” which looks just like “avant-garde art.”Thus she saw art photographers in a situation of “despair,” between“the dead hand” of earlier art aesthetics and a “snapshot school,” whoseadherents might not even consider themselves photographers.24

Whatever validity this account has as history, it fails as aesthetics,through an error of decontextualization—which, ironically, became astandard objection to aesthetic approaches to photography in the follow-ing decades of “social documents” photo criticism and history.25 The ar-gument falls at its first, aesthetic, post. We begin with photos accepted asart, such as Szarkowski’s six Westons, then seek vernacular ones that re-

23. John Szarkowski, The Photographer’s Eye (New York, 1966), p. 6.24. Janet Malcolm, Diana and Nikon: Essays on the Aesthetic of Photography (Boston, 1980),

p. 64; hereafter abbreviated DN. Malcolm refers to “the heavy-breathing traditions of Stieglitz,Steichen, Weston, et al.” (DN, p. 67).

25. Edward Steichen had been criticized for the decontextualizations of his traveling 1955MoMA show and best-selling book, The Family of Man (New York, 1996). Ansel Adams “trulydetested” Steichen’s quality and scale of reproduction and “became ill” on seeing his workturned into “expensive wallpaper” (Ansel Adams and Mary Street Alinder, Ansel Adams: AnAutobiography [Boston, 1985], pp. 209–10).


semble them. But in selecting art photos one already looks for those thatwill have vernacular correlates. So, for example, nothing by Ansel Adamsor Alfred Stieglitz was chosen.26 Such egregious sampling bias, even whenexpanded by “thousands of vernacular photographs that have since beenunearthed,” defeats empirical validity (DN, p. 65). The situation is worseregarding aesthetics, “what photographs look like,” for in selecting vernac-ular cases with the canonic in mind, the former’s appearance will be af-fected because we look at them differently. A small percentage of theirmasses will, largely accidentally, look interesting in ways established by thecanonic ones.27

Poor reasoning from perceptual data is also encouraged when, in showsand catalogues, photographs are taken singly rather than in context of thephotographers’ bodies of work. This, too, will affect the way pictures ap-pear, something particularly true of photographs. Photographers—unlikenovelists, playwrights, and film directors—rarely make artistic impres-sions by single works. That is because of a general point regarding percep-tion. Experience with a variety of cases is usually necessary for telling onekind of thing from others of very similar sorts, which in time becomes easy.Not learning to tell at a glance one size or kind of screw or nail fromanother, one is moved to a different area of hardware. The same goes formany occupations. Technicians learn to read X-rays, gauge (reversed) col-ors in color negatives, feel and hear wheel-bearing problems. All this be-comes more specific with art—although not uniquely so—when weconsider seeing in a work what has been done, which is more difficult inmost photography than in most painting and drawing, where facture isvisible. The phrase “what has been done” brings us back to the topic ofagency; to address that, we now turn from more historical to more philo-sophical considerations.

26. Szarkowski would defend the fine-art idea in terms of what artists do with this commonform, as suggested on the last page of his introduction; see Szarkowski, The Photographer’s Eye,p. 11.

27. We pass over as hyperbole the line, “it almost seems as if every master photographstrainfully created by an art photographer has an equivalent in the unselfconscious vernacularof commercial or news or amateur photography” (DN, p. 64). See references to two anthologiesof essays including similar indistinguishable arguments in Maynard, “Photo-Opportunity:Photography as Technology,” Canadian Review of American Studies 22 (Winter 1991): 501–28,esp. n. 14. Perhaps the most thoughtful, researched critique of the earlier attempt to placephotography among the fine arts, at times using indistinguishability arguments, is Ulrich F.Keller, “The Myth of Art Photography: A Sociological Analysis,” History of Art Photography 8(Oct.–Dec. 1984): 249–75 and “Myth of Art Photography: An Iconographical Analysis,” Historyof Art Photography 9 (Jan.–Mar. 1985): 1–38.


5. “Assembling Reminders”: Agents and ArtifactsAmong our components, craft and expression stand out as what might

be called the formative pair.28 Both straightforwardly concern agency.Thus, craft values involve admiring the way things have been done, not justthe way they turned out. This is because artworks are, as the term saystwice, things produced on purpose, not just aesthetically interesting hap-penings, which are far more abundant in nature. The more general termfor them is artifacts, which also makes the point twice. It may seem tooobvious to state that photographs, too, are artifacts. Yet, as Ludwig Witt-genstein remarked, “the work of the philosopher is a gathering of remind-ers for a particular purpose.”29 Let us see whether, just by remindingourselves that photographs and artworks are artifacts, and thinking aboutwhat that means, we can clear away some of the problems concerning theiragency and indicate what remains.

The crucial idea appears to be purpose. As artifacts, artworks are thingslargely made on purpose by agents. Understanding them that way, we takethem in terms of purposes. Thus a first intentional result: since artworksare artifacts, they are perceived and comprehended in terms of agency, andtheir relevant features are taken under intention, in the sense of being thereon purpose, normally for purposes. Since this is how we perceive them, itaffects their aesthetics, in the normal sense of that term, as delight or thereverse, for its own sake, in the perceiving.

Beginning with the on-purpose part, let us consider another philoso-pher’s reminder of what we already know. Explaining art generally (on theway to fine art) Immanuel Kant observed that when we notice some lum-ber in a bog we take it quite differently from its surround.30 This is becausewe understand a board to be “ein Werk.” That has two meanings in termsof purposes and agents’ intentions—or, as Kant says, thoughts. We expe-

28. Aristotle held that good use of any art requires not only abidance by its general rulesbut individual talent and judgment in their application because rules are of the universal butaction is always to the concrete and particular; see Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. DavidRoss (Oxford, 1980), esp. book 6, ch. 7, 1141b, pp. 144–47.

29. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophische Untersuchungen (Basil, 1953), 1.127; my trans.30.

If . . . in a search through a bog, we light on a piece of hewn wood, we do not say it is aproduct of nature but of art. Its producing cause had an end in view to which the object[has to thank for] its form. [Even] apart from such cases, we recognize [an] art in every-thing formed in such a way that its [activity] must have been preceded by a representationof the thing in its cause (as [with] . . . bees), although the effect could not have been thoughtby the cause. But where anything is called absolutely a work of art, to distinguish it from anatural product, then [a] work of man [ein Werk der Menschen] is always understood.

(Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. James Creed Meredith [Oxford, 1911], p. 163. Ihave slightly altered the translation.)


rience aspects of the board as being for purposes—to be nailed up. Such isalso true of living parts of the bog; however—this is Kant’s point—unlikethem, we take the artifact’s being these ways as on purpose: cut and milledfor that. The artifact stands out from its surroundings because, with rec-ognition, we look at its aspects differently.31

Regarding for purpose, comprehending functional aspects or what aretermed affordances of artifacts in intentional terms appears to be a basicfeature of human cognitive development by around nine months.Sensory-motor affordances are the aspects of entities that we exploit tohelp us do things. By imitation, guidance, and trial and error, childrenlearn a multitude of them. In addition, some such things acquire what arecalled intentional affordances. These are artifacts. According to Michael To-masello, a child watching an adult using an everyday artifact soon identifies

the user’s goal, what she is using the artifact “for.” By engaging inthis imitative learning, the child joins the other person in affirm-ing what “we” use this object “for”: we use hammers for hammer-ing and pencils for writing. [The child then] comes to see somecultural objects and artifacts as having, in addition to their naturalsensory-motor affordances, another set of . . . intentional affor-dances based on her understanding of the intentional relationsthat other persons have with that object or artifact [and] the worldthrough the artifact.32

Things then appear to a child differently, and asking what an artifact isfor—what we are supposed to do with it—becomes a normal way of askingwhat it is. Sharp edges are then experienced as blades, rounded parts ashandles, pools of water as troughs, collection pools, baths, not just pud-dles, and so forth. The emphasis upon “for” in this story is thus a stronglysocial one. However, Tomasello’s story appears incomplete. It presup-poses Kant’s aspect of artifacts, that they are made or adapted, by intent,for use affordances. After all, children also learn how we use natural affor-dances of things like water or our hands, which are not artifacts. The facts

31. For my related arguments, see Maynard, “Scales of Space and Time in Photography:‘Perception Points Two Ways,’” in Philosophy and Photography: Essays on the Pencil of Nature,ed. Scott Walden (London, 2008), pp. 187–209, “Working Light,” Philosophy and Photography 1(Mar. 2010): 29–34, and “What Drawing Draws On: The Relevance of Current VisionResearch,” Rivista di Estetica 51, no. 47 (2011): 9–29.

32. Michael Tomasello, The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition (Cambridge, Mass.,1999), pp. 84–85. For earlier and later related accounts, see Tomasello and Josep Call, PrimateCognition (New York, 1997), and Tomasello, Why We Cooperate (Cambridge, Mass., 2009).Tomasello gives little attention to the on-purpose aspect of artifacts. There is also a significantdistinction to be explored between fixed and makeshift artifacts.


that in a few societies ants have affordances for eating or that stars are usedfor guidance does not turn them into artifacts. Failure to grasp either sortof purpose would count as a disability, what psychologists call an associa-tive agnosia, of not knowing meanings—akin to being unable to recognizeobjects or faces by sight or touch or to integrate movements into actions.Consider relative abilities or inabilities to experience things in terms of thefor-purpose group, as

(1) affordances (a) for self, (b) others,(2) fixed (for example, organic) affordances (a) for self, (b) others,(3) intentional (fixed) affordances (a) for one’s group, (b) others (for

us, for them); or in terms of the on-purpose group, as:(4) being on purpose: made or done by agents,(5) being on purpose for other purposes (other than just doing it).

Of course we always come up short perceiving some of these potentials,and it is possible to perceive without exercising some of them, more orless, at certain levels, without mental disability. We should not over-look the complementary disability: well-known conditions of the over-attribution of meaning. Many aspects of artifacts are neither on nor forpurposes, but occur—as already stressed—by chance. Understandingthem requires grasping this. It is therefore no wonder that issues ofchance should affect our understanding of works of art, fine art, andphotography. This is confirmed by difficulties audiences have with fast-changing experimental arts and art from other cultures. Audiences areoften at first uncertain about what aspects of these works are for—whythey are there—and so cannot distinguish among accidents, mistakes,lack of skill, and incompletion. In the terms just introduced, audiencesmay not at first sufficiently grasp the intentional affordances of suchworks, but in time they usually do, as the recent great success of mu-seums demonstrates.

6. Applications: Artifacts and the ComponentsBefore turning to specifically photographic agencies in these terms,

let us consider the bearing of these simple facts about artifacts on ourearlier components theme. Regarding aesthetic experience, we canidentify the influential idea of an aesthetic attitude, which is often usedto minimize the three other factors—the idea that we can disengagefrom the entire list of purposes above and perceive a thing “for what itis” (to use the most common expression). Whether or not that is prac-ticable, we surely do take more or less interest in things that way.However, since aesthetic interest is delight or the reverse in experiences


of perceiving, and given that (1)–(5) characterize perceptual experi-ences, there seems no reason why that kind of perception cannot beaesthetic also. For what it is is an artifact, and we experience it as such.This accounts for our normal readiness to count functional apprecia-tion of functional things as aesthetic.

Regarding mimesis, research in pictorial depiction now prevalent inphilosophy and the perceptual sciences needs reminding of anotherimportant fact about perceptual context: artifact perception. Over-looking the fact that depictions, photographic or not, are normallyunderstood as artifacts, these researchers miss the important differ-ences between looking at things and looking at depictions of them.Notably, they forget that we look at depictions, but not real scenes, interms of their depictive artifact for affordances and in terms of a highlydistinctive on purpose; that is, we look to see why certain aspects ofartifacts were put or left there—and for what they are doing there, interms of pictorial purposes. This explains much of the hesitation aboutphotographic arts. Mechanical and accidental kinds of automatismusually make identifying what is in an image on purpose, for goals,more problematic for photographs than for other kinds of images. Butanother reminder is that, as remarked, it becomes easier to see what animage maker is doing, doing distinctively, in a given work when wehave experience of a wider body of cases.

Here photography seems to come in for a special forgetfulness thatartifacts, just at the level of being for-purpose things, are, like livingnature, typically multifunctional and for the same reason: efficiency.To be for something hardly entails not being for anything else.33 Thus afourteen-thousand-year-old multifunctional stone tool likely showsaffordances for cutting, scraping, spooning, and tamping—all com-bined in smooth actions, as with a modern palette knife (fig. 2). Aphotographic design can, too, while also working as a trace for detecting, evenfor seeing, a situation—again all together, possibly interacting with andchanging one another. Unfortunately, forgetting this second simple fact hasbeen a stultifying premise of much of the philosophical photoaesthetics of therecent period. Multiple functions of course complicate answers to the ques-tion “what’s that for (doing there)?”—more so when, as normal, they interact.To this story needs to be added chapters on chance, since, as with other visual

33. For Paleolithic tools another reason might be that their refined, specialized diversity,which is also indicative of modern humans, arose from millions of years of multifunctionalmatrix single stones.


arts, photographic acts include using—inviting—chance for depictive, aesthetic, andexpressive purposes.

7. For ShowLet us review what a brief consideration

of photographs as artifacts has revealedabout their expressive content. Intentionalcontent enters our experience of artifacts intwo ways. We experience artifacts as havingcome about through intelligent agency thatallows for and exploits accidents, and interms of cultural uses. In the latter way weexperience them, as Kant also argued—although too broadly—socially, as repre-sentatives of communities.34 Thereby, asTomasello remarks, “the world of cul-tural artifacts becomes imbued with in-

tentional affordances.”35 However, works of fine art are special kinds ofartifacts. How can photo art—any art—so greatly expand the artifac-tual, intentional bases we have sketched? Showing that would be tooambitious an undertaking for this essay, especially as it would requireexamples. Brief indications of two large topics must suffice.

A notable feature of artworks among artifacts is that they are largelyfashioned for show or display. Museums and their exhibitions—for exam-ple the British Museum’s “A History of the World in One Hundred Ob-jects” (actually, one hundred artifacts)—put a variety of things on display,many of which were not originally for that purpose. Being for displaymeans, generally, that features are present for the sake of being perceived.This would not likely hold for the intentional visual affordances of the littleancient artifact shown in figure 2 or the big modern one in figure 3. But itdoes hold for that in figure 1 and entirely for the three figures themselves;they are as they are in order to be looked at in certain ways.

Therefore, when we wonder what some aspects of a visual artwork arefor (“what’s that doing there?”), this normally includes visual display—how they are designed so as to appear to us. Artworks tend, according toMichael Podro, to sustain recognition of such intentional affordances for

34. See Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. J. H. Bernard (New York, 1951), §40, on sensuscommunis.

35. Tomasello, The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition, p. 86.

F I G U R E 2 . Fourteen-thousand-year-old stone multitool. BritishMuseum.


our perception.36 In so doing, they draw on a remarkably wide range ofmental and psychological contents. This seemingly inexhaustible play ofengagement and reward is a main reason why such works may be candi-dates for continuing display. A prominent kind introduces a significantcomponent of art where, as Podro emphasizes, “sustained recognition” isof subject matter in figuratively representational works—which photo-graphs mostly are. In sketching a case for photographic expression, wehave to omit close examination of the representational component as well.Representation introduces an additional power for greatly increased men-tal content through guided imagining of perceiving subject matter. Asnoted it is this kind of content that archaeologists take as most indicative ofmodern humans’ mental powers.37

8. Digitalization: Some Sweeping GeneralizationsLet us conclude by briefly recovering our historical perspective. Digita-

lization has illuminated this whole story by complicating it. Thus the most

36. See Michael Podro, Depiction (New Haven, Conn., 1998), pp. 5–28.37. I argue an account of depictive content in Maynard, Drawing Distinctions: The Varieties

of Graphic Expression (Ithaca, N.Y., 2005), esp. chap. 14.

F I G U R E 3 . Photograph of Robert Burley, Still Revolution, Museum of ContemporaryCanadian Art, Toronto.


stated concern about photographic digitalization, in art and otherwise, isthat, by encroaching on the two kinds of photo automatism it makes theboundaries of agency more difficult to perceive. If previously the mainworry was about how much chance and nature did, there is now a worryabout what photographers have done with the workings of chance andnature. The solution will likely be, as before, that with increased experiencewe figure things out. For, with the question of what’s that for? with suchartifacts typically comes another common question relating to agency, butnot so often mentioned in aesthetics: how was that done?—for photogra-phy, no less with current large digital displays than with early daguerreo-types. On our topic of agency, it is too often overlooked that a mainfunction of art museums is to give us ideas about how things can be made.Our vision is interrogative not only regarding purposes but also regardingmaterials and methods. As we look, inquire, and find out, our perceptiondevelops.

Consider the following example: a digital photograph of a courtyardwall at Toronto’s Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art (MOCCA),displaying an enlargement of part of Robert Burley’s photograph of theimplosion of silver-processing buildings at Kodak Park, Rochester, be-ing photographed by Kodak employees with digital cameras (fig. 3).38

Typical of artifacts of mental content, we have three nested works ofdisplay: mine, the installation at MOCCA, and Burley’s original, eachof which includes other displays. (The implosion itself is likely not adisplay since, unlike fireworks, its impressive perceptual affordancesdo not seem intentional as such.) The installation has a mental qualityof wit through the way it engages and sustains subject recognitions,notably in its play of picture plane with textured wall, its trompe l’oeilgame with images of wires (none actual) at wire height on the wallacross a window opening. The implosion photograph, which holds usby the recognition-content of curiosity-vision, gains expressive con-tent by being one in a series for that event and part of the larger Dis-appearance of Darkness project. This artist shoots film, edits digitally.Such works are analogue, continuous-tone, “chromogenic” (RA-4)prints, standard to negative color printing, but adapted to digital filesby Lightjet laser exposure on 75 x 100 cm photographic sheets, devel-oped normally but digitally enlarged.39 That brief report sketches a

38. See “Still Revolution,” detail of Implosion-2, Buildings 65 and 69, Kodak Park, Rochester,2007, from Robert Burley’s Disappearance of Darkness project, 2010. For details seewww.robertburley.com/index.php/site/gallery/public_installations_2008_2009/

39. For Burley’s account of further technological steps with a similar project, seewww.robertburley.com/index.php/site/gallery/public_installations_2008_2009/


hybridization of processes, typical of visual arts for centuries, onlystages of which bear on our sense of what has been done artistically. Butwhat seems significant about the digitalization, here as elsewhere, is itsamplification of those powers of hybridization, once all the informa-tion is translated into its controllable common currency.40 That in-cludes information about nature, mechanism, chance, and artists’actions.

From their beginnings, photographic inventions have continuouslyraised questions about the roles of intelligent agents, chance, and na-ture. We began by considering these through the idea of fine arts as ahistorical artifact, like photography. However, as most artifacts havealternatives, so does fine art: an alternative of wide use, which has alsobeen well articulated in a variety of cultures. This is what might becalled the idea of the manifestation work. In the terms of the modernarts idea, one might say that with manifestation the expression com-ponent is expanded beyond individuals, human groups, even beyondminds.41 In its traditions, it is nature or reality that is taken to express orshow itself in works, which are then considered less as artifacts regard-ing than as manifestations of reality—usually as exemplifying parts oraspects. With such works, concerns about human agents’ intention,self-expression, and identity recede, as do distinctions of art and chance.One historical effect of photography’s automatisms may be understood asof manifestation tending to replace self-expression. Indeed, that blender offormative elements, digitalization, arrived at a time when many artists hadbecome less interested in the art tradition that we have been examining—one well expressed by Hegel, in which, individually or collectively, we seekidentity and freedom through art by setting ourselves apart from nature.42

Photography had already lent itself to this older manifestation conception,to the puzzlement of many who were only accustomed to the fine-artsgrouping. Perhaps a sense of that has troubled us regarding photography.Digitalization may change that.

40. For a fuller account, see Timothy Binkley, “The Vitality of Digital Creation,” Journal ofAesthetics and Art Criticism 55 (Spring 1997): 107–16.

41. It would be more accurate to describe manifestation as a function of an image, as I arguedin Maynard, “The Secular Icon: Photography and the Functions of Images,” Journal of Aesthetics andArt Criticism 42 (Winter 1983): 155–69 and later in Engine of Visualization, chap. 8.

42. For his treatment of the four components, see Hegel, “Art, Nature, Freedom”; see alsoOscar Wilde, “The New Aesthetics,” in Aesthetics, pp. 192–97, 40–45.


Documents

Arts, Agents, Artifacts- Photography's Automatisms