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 IT J RROL L VINSON

Warburton, N. - Photography

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  IT

J RROL

L VINSON

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THE OXFORD H ND OOK OF

 ESTHETI S

 dited y

JERROLD LEVINSON

OX ORUNIVERSITY PRESS

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OXFORUNIVBRSITY PRESS

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 H PTER  

PHOTO R PHY

NIGEL WARBURTON

PHOTO R PHY is the most widespread form of visual communication using still

images. Since its invention the medium has not changed substantially, or at least not

until the recent invention of digital photography. The uses to which photography

has been put and the conventions surrounding those uses have, however, evolved

significantly.

Those analytic philosophers who have written about still photography have for

the most part focused on quite a narrow range of topics. Their main concern hasbeen to characterize the nature of the causal link between object photographed and

photographic image. A recent survey of philosophical writing on the aesthetics of

photography Currie   98), for example, concentrated exclusively on the question

of the relation between photography s mechanicity and its alleged transparency to

its objects arising from the optico-chemical causal link between a photograph and

what it is of Although the unravelling of such matters relates directly to questions

in aesthetics, the questions themselves are questions about the nature of photo

graphic representation and apply just as much to snapshots and evidential uses of

photography as they do to photographic artworks.

This reluctance of philosophers to descend from general analyses of  the photo

graph to come to grips with questions about photographic art can be explained in

part by the relatively recent invention of photography and also by a past tendency to

disparage the notion of photographic art. Now that most major art collections

include works of photographic art, there are fewer excuses for ignoring photography s

most ambitious employment. True, there are still those who agree with Baudelaire,

who   n ~ declared that photography s true duty was  to be the serv ;;;:rtQf the

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PHOTOGRAPHY 6 5

sciences and arts but the very humble servant, like printing or shorthand, which

have neither created nor supplemented literarure Baudelaire 1859: 113 . But most

writers on photography now at least acknowledge that photographic art is possible,

even i with notable exceptions such as Snyder and Allen 1975, Batkin 199 , and

Savedoff 1999), they have had relatively little to say about particular examples of it.

1 BAZIN AND CAVELL:

AUTOMATIC PICTURES

Much late twentieth-century philosophizing about photography is the direct

descendant of Realist  ilm theory. Andre   is a major influence here. In his

short essay The Ontology of the Photographic Image Bazin 1945) he isolated a

number of t h e m ~ t subsequent photography theorists have taken up and elab

orated. He allowed that still photography had achieved many of the aims ofBaroque art by producing likenesses in ~ o m e t r i l perspective, but his main claim

;astliat photography had gone much furth;r than this. Photographs are not just

good likenesses in the way that paintings can be: their idiosyncratic causal link with

their subject matter places them in a class.aRart. To convey this idea, Bazin made a

hyperbolic identification of image and object represented:

The photographic image is the object itself, the object freed from the conditions.QULme and

space that govern it.  Bazin 1945:  4

Presumably he couldn t have meant that my photograph of Georges Simenon actu

ally is Simenon. A comment in a later essay,  Theatre and Cinema: provides a gloss

on this exaggerated account:

 ts automatic genesis distinguishes  t radically from the other techniques of reproduction

The photograph proceeds by means of the lens to the taking of a veritable impression in

light to a mold such  t carries with  t more than mere resemblance namely a kind of

identity.  Bazin 1951: 96

In other words, the photograph is different in kind from other forms of pictorial

representation. My photograph of Simenon doesn t just look like him: it is some

how closer, or more ~ t l y connected, to the man than a drawing or painting

could be, a kind of relic.  In The   n t o o ~ of the Photographic Image: Bazin clainis that photographs

do not involve significant intentional input and are therefore in some sense  9bj.ec -

tive. Playing on the fact that in French the lens is called the objectif , he writesof the essentially objective character of photography . On the PartPlayed by the

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6 6 NIGEL WARBURTON

photographer, he comments:

For the first time an image of the world is formed automatically without the creative inter-

ventionof

man he personalityof

the photographer enters into the proceedings only in hisselectio oLthe..<>bject to be photographed and   of the urpose be has in mind.

  l t h ~ g b the final result may reflect something of his ersonality;trus does not play the

same role as is played by that of the painter.   Bazin 1945: 13)

Bazin s take on photography resurfaced in the 1970S in Stanley Ca,YfIl s description

of the medium in his book The World V-e ed (revised edn 197   first published in

1971), a work that focused mainly on moving images. There he claimed that in pho

tography the mechanical nature of th;process what he called its automatism ,

~ v e d the s u ~ t i v e e.lement from pictorial representation:  Photography overcame subjectivity in a way undreamed of by painting a way that could not

satisfy painting one which does not   much defeat the act of painting as escape it altogether:

by automatism by removing the human agent from the task of reproduction.   Cavell 1979: 20)

Furthermore, Cavell claimed that all photographs are necessarily of reality in a way

that paintings only rarely are: you can always ask what is behind a building in a

photograph. As he put it, We might say: ~ a i n t i n is a world; a photo raph is  the . orld (Cavell 1979: 24).  

Both H. Gene Blorker (1977) and Joel Snyder (1983) took issue with the idea that  . .

a painting s world is fundamentally different from that of a photograph. As will 

emerge in my discussion below, claims such as Cavell s only m k ~ e if at all, of

a p.ill1kular range of documentary or detective uses of photography-pictor;;:;) or

depictive uses of photography, like paintings, create their own worlds.

The idea that photographs are in some sense o b ~ t i v e and that they are necessarily of the world is found in one of the more controversial philosophical articles n photography, Roger Scruton s Photography and Representation (Scruton 1983;

first published 1981). ThG hicle and Kendall Walton s Transparent Pictures

(Walton 1984) are the t w ~ t J i g u i f i c a n t and most discussed manifestations of

photography theory in the t r ~ of Bazin. Scruton and Walton are jointly

responsible for persuading an ¥tic philosophers that there are philoso;mamy

inte;i;sting questions to be asked about the natureof

photographic representation.

2 SCRUTON AND HIS CRITICS

S<: : Q n claims that photography, at least in its ideal form, is not an_intentional process

but an optico-chemical one. This is consistent with Cavell s account. Paintings present 

us with a way of seeing their subjects and embody thoughts about those subjects,

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  , ,--

PHOTO R PHY 617

whereas ideal photographs are merely surrogates for their subjects:

With an ideal photograph it is neither necessary nor even possible that the photographer s

intention should enter as a seriousfact or in determining how t e picture is seen.  t is recog-  -ised at once forn-ow something looked.  n some sense looking at a photograph is

a s u ~ t for looking   thing itself.   Scruton 1983: 111

The subject of a paintin mayor may not erist; that of an ideal photograph neces

sarily exmsand looks more or less liKe ille photograph: photographs, because of

thcir optico-chemical origins, are tr nsp r nt to what th y represent. Photographs  - -are more like mirrors than they are like paintings. The surprising conclusion that

Scruton draws from this characterization of ideal photography is that photography

is not re presentational. Clearly, photographs are representational in that they stand

in for their objects; but what Scruton means by this claim is that photographs  r

t r n s p ~ n t to their objects, and so are no t themselves of aesthetic interest:

if one finds a photograph beautiful, it is because one finds something beautiful in its sub

jects. A painting may be beautiful, on the other hand, even when it represents an ugly thing.

  Scruton 1983: 114

Many readers took this conclusion to be an attack on the idea that there could bephotographic art. Scruton maintained that the medium of photography is  inher

ently pornographic , by which he meant that photography provides a substitute for

its objects rather than embodied thoughts about those objects.

Scruton concedes that actual photography may differ from the ideal of photog

raphy that he describes. Actual photography may involve the photographer exer

cising control over detail in the photograph, but ortly at the cost of ceasing to be

pure photography: in Scruton s terms, such photography pollutes the medium,

turning it into a kind of painting. He is adamant that only the grossest elements of

style can be achieved with this essentially transparent medium.

Scruton s article, which has been reprinted in several different versions since its

first appearance, has been much criticized see e.g. Wicks 1989 and King 1992 .

  seems to be a form of question::begging to define an ideal of photography that

differs significantly from actual photography, and then to draw conclusions about

the nature of the medium on the basis of it. William King for example, undertook

to show through the consideration of specific examples how an interest in a photograph need not be an interest in its subject. He concluded that some photographs

can be interesting in on e way that paintings can be, namely, aesthetically interest

ing by virtue of the l a n n ~ f representation King 1992: 264 . Several years before

Scruton s piece appeared, Joel Snyder and Neil Walsh Allen published a wide-r--

ranging article which convincin Iy undermined the view that p o t o ~ s  print

themselves and that photographs s ~ o w u ore or less what the eye sees:

The notion that a photograph shows us  what we would have seen had we been there   Uf

vselves has to be qualified to the point of ~ A photograph shows us  what we would  

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  8 NIGEL WARBURTON

have seen at a certain moment in time, f ~ r t i n pointJb c kept our head immobile

 n ~ ~   eye  n we saw things w t the equivalent of a Iso mm or 24-rnm lens  n

we saw things in Agfacolor or in Tri-X developed  n D76 and printed on Kodabromide

3 paper. By the time all the conditions are added up the origiD? pQsition   been reversed:instead of saying that the camera shows us what our eyes would see, we are now positing the

rather unilluminating proposition that, if our visioll-W )t ked like photography, then we

would see things the way a camera does. ( nyder and Allen 1975: 15 ,2)  Snyder and Allen make a convincing case for the photograp. le 's i n ~ t i v role

in photographic picture-making, a case that could be used t6 reply to Scruton's

later critique.

However, there is a s ~ r s p o n s ~ to Scruton. This is based on the recognition that sophisticated photographic commumcation is typically achieved through

creating a repertoire of images within which new meanings are given. Scruton was

wrong to think of photography as styleless, or at best stylistically impoverished:

individual style in photography is not achieved solely by   o n t r o l ~ e t i l within ingle images (see Warburton 1996). Hence, even   it were true that individual pho-

tographic images were styleless because of the photographer's lack of control over

detail, it would not follow that the medium was essentially styleless.

3. WALTON AND HIS CRITICS

Snyder   ndAllen are undoubtedly correct that photographs don t show us precisely

what our eyes would have seen. Yet there is a widespread temptation to treat look

ing at photo raphs as a m e i t ~ y of 109king at thin\s. For example, when you

100 at Bill Brandtt portrait photograph of the painter Francis Bacon on Primrose

Hill, it can be tempting to say that you can see Francis Bacon. At least, the experi

ence of looking   t a photograph of someone feels more like actually looking

at them than does the typical experience of looking at a portrait painting. Many

writers on photography have commented on this experience. Roland Barthes

describes it  n his   ameraLucida

One day, quite some time ago, I happened on a photograpb of Napoleon's youngest brother,

Jerome, taken in   852 And I realized then. with an amazement I have not been able to lessen

since:  I am looking at eyes that looked at the Emperor.' (Barthes 1984: 3

atrick Maynard, in his dialogue on the subject of photography 'The Secular leon',

gave an explanation of the sense of immediacy that photographs can give:

If there s a bright window opposite a wall and you hold a magnifying glass near the wall

you ll be able to see a little image of the window (or what is outside it on the wall. And by

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PHOTO R PHY 619

seeing this image you indirectly see what is outside. As you know a camera is just a device

for fixing such images So by seeing the photograph you indirectly see what it depicts. We

see actual things by means of photography. Maynard 1983: 160).

Kendall Walton developed iliis idea. arguing iliat the causal chain from object to

photograph allows us literally to see through photographs to ilieir objects:

with the assistance of the camera we can see not only around corners and what is distant or

small; we can also see into the past. We see long deceased ancestors when we look at dusty

snapshots of them   We see quite literally our dead relatives themselves when we look at

photographs of them.  Walton 1984: 251 252)

This transparencyof

photography is thus for Walton the essenceof

photographicrealism. Like Bazin. he sees photography as gomg beyond the aim of achieving

v r i s i m i l i t u ~ o r i n g to Walton. photographic realism is different in kind from

r l i s ~ p i i l l i n g because we actually see our relatives when we look at photographs

of iliem. And this is true. wheilier or not ilie photographs look like ilie people iliey

are of. His argument to iliis conclusion relies on going down ilie slippery slope from

ordinary seeing. through seeing through mirrors. glasses. microscopes. telescopes.

and television images. to seeing into ilie past through photographs. We do not see

through paintings and drawings. because what we see is mediated by the minds of

human b;ings and   not mechanically produced.  fall that were at stake were

verisimilitude. ilien iliere would be no essential difference between paintings and

photographs. As it is Walton explains, photogra hic.realism is different in kind from

realism in painting.

Walton maintains that his account of photography can give a plausible explan

ation of. for example, a picture being less shocking when ilie viewer realizes iliat it

is a photograph of a life-sized sculpture, rather ilian of a nude couple: if it is a photograph of a sculpture ilien we only see a representation of a couple, whereas if it

had been a photograph of ilie couple. ilien we would literally see ilieir nakedness.

Similarly, Walton believes iliat his account can explain ilie particular kind of experi

ence viewers bave when they learn iliat a self-portrait by ilie photo-realist painter

Chuck Close is really a painting and not a photograph:

  Ufexperience of the picture and   f attitude toward it undergo a profound transform

ation on which is much deeper and more significant than the change which occurs whenwe discover that what we first took to be an etching for example. is actually a pen-and-ink

drawing.  tis more like discovering a guard   a wax museum to be just another wax figure.

We feel somehow less in contact with Close when we learn that portrayal of him is not

photographic.  Walton 1984: 255).

Walton s critics e.g. Martin 1986; Warburton  9 b; Currie 1991; Carroll  996a

have provided a range of arguments for digging our heels in at a certain p oint on

ilie descent down ilie slippery slope; or, to use a variant on ilie metaphor, tbey have

argued iliat ilie slope is not as slippery as Walton would have us believe. There are

relevant differences between ordinary senses of seeing and what Walton thinks of

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62 NIGE L WARBURTON

as seeing through photographs. For example, Martin (1986) has argued that more

natural breaking points occurwhen we distinguish between real and virtual images,

and that the length of a causal chain is a determining factor in whether or not it is

appropriate to describe an experience as one of seeing. Warburton  1988b identi

fied four factors characteristic of o r d i { a r y ~ but i c mg from the relation-etween object and photograph: (I) virtual simultaneity (in caSeSbf ordinary see-

ing, what is seen is hap pe ;; ing almost Simultaneously with our experience of its

happening); (2) sensitivi to change (potentially visible changes inwhat is seen are

matched by changes in what is seen); (3) temporal congruity (actions seen take the ame time as it takes us to see them); and (4) viewer s knowledge of the causal chain

(we usually have a basic knowledge about how dur perceptions are linked to theircauses). Gregory Currie (1991) has also argued that Walton goes too far in describ

ing the relationship between viewer and photographed object as a straightforward

perceptual one. Against Walton, he maintains that photographs are re resenta

tional: we do not literally see through them. Currie captures differences be een

photographs and p,yntings by describing the former as natural representations and

the latteras inte? nal representations. Photographs are natural representations

because they exHibit natural dependence on their objects; that is, they display

counterfactual dependence of a kind that need not be mediated by human inten

tion. According to Currie, when I look at a photograph of an ancestor, I see a

representation ofmy ancestor, not the ancestor himself.

Walton has not, however, felt the need to modify his theory in the light of these

sorts of criticism, most of which are in Martin (1986). (For Walton s replies, see

Walton 1986, 1997.) In his most recent reply, Walton maintains that both Carroll and

Currie have misconstrued his transparency thesis. They have assumed that it entails

that photographs are not representational; however, his position is that  photographs, documentary photographs included, induce imagining seein and are rep- esentationsJ :kpictiQI\S,-\>ictures), in addition tq...being transparent (Walton 1997: 8).   Jonathan Friday has made clear in his useful overview of the debate (Friday

1996), the question of whether or not Walton is correct in his analysis of photo-

graphy ultimately hinges on contentious issues wit in the philosophy of perception.

  ME IUM SPE IFI ITY

A notable feature of Scruton s and Walton s articles is their ~ about pho

tography: Scruton clearly-beliEYes that photography has   n ~ n e that is captured by

his notion of ideal photography and  polluted by the use of painterly techniques,while for Walton the essence of photograp y is its transparency in the special sense he

  .

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PHOTOGRAPHY 6

outlines. Bazin and Cavell are equally essentialistic in their treatment of photography.

Noel Carroll has put the a r g u l l ~ n t s against essentialism or what he calls medium

specificity in photography and film theory in a series of artides Carroll 1984-5, 985, 987 996a , reprinted in his Theorizing the Moving I ~ C a r r < l 1 l 1 9 9 6 b There he

draws attention to the fact that

There is not  n essence of photographic media or of photographic representation that

directs the evolution of these media or our proper appreciative responses to these media

The media rather are adapted to the cultural purposes and projects we find for them. The

relevant types of representation we observe in photography and cinema  re not a function

of the ontology of the photographic image but of the purposes we have found respectively

for still and moving photography. Carroll   996b:48)

If Carroll is right that there is no intrinsic essence of photography, but rather a series

of uses to which the various photographic media can be put, then the implication

seems to be that philosophers of photography will have to look very dosely at some

of the ways in which photographs are actually used and at the meanings they

arc given in those uses. Investigating an ideal of photography, or photography s

 essence: is likely to give a partial and perhaps irrelevant account of the various com

municative potentials of the medium as they exist within particular social contexts.

5. US S O PHOTOGR PHY

Patrick Maynard, in a series of articles Maynard 1983, 1985, 1989, 1991) culminating

in the book The Engine oJVisualization   Maynard 1997 has provided a frameworkfor understanding photography as a range of technologies put to varied uses. These

imaging technologies amplify and also filter our powers to detect things and our

powers to imagine things. Maynard s work provides a useful antidote to some of the

more simplistic assumptions of earlier theorists who have tended to ignore the

range of uses of the medium. Maynard distinguishes between photographic  tion-----<letermined by what a photograph is of qua photochemical trace and pho

tographic d ~ p i c t i o n < l e t e r E . e d by whatii: pictures, which   ~ be  thing at all Photographic detections and photographic depictions can b o ~ m p l i f your i ~ > P G W e r s The blurring of what a photograph is of with what it is

a photographic depiction of has been a continuing source of confusion in the

philosophy of photography. In all his writing about photography, Maynard is very

dear about this distinction. For instance, in The Engine oJVisualization   writes:

 ike  ny other depictive technology photography provides methods of marking sur-

f ces that entice imagining Sometimes this is accomplished by photographing what is

depicted sometimes not Movies provide many routine  s well  s interesting examples

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  NIGEL WARBURTON

Although  in ong depicts a giant ape climbing the Empire State Building and was made

by filming various things none of them w s n ape or the Empire State Building The photo

stills from that sequence  re not photographs ofwhat they depict nor would anyone expect

them to   eso.  Maynard 1997: 114

Warburton used a similar distinction to spell out the implications of various pho-

 tographic deceptions, including the controversy surrounding the alleged staging

of Robert Capa s Spanish Republican Soldier at the Very Instant  Otliis Death

(Warburton  99 998). We can use the term documentary mode to cover uses of

photography where it is assumed that the photograph pictures what it is of;  pic-~ photographs, by contrast, are photographic   e ~ t i o n s which mayor

may not picture their causes. If Capa s photograph was staged, then his use of it inphotojournalistic context was a clear transgression of the role responsibilities of the

photojournalist to provide images in the documentary mode, that is, photographs

that are at least not deliberately misleading about what they are of.

Barbara Savedoff addresses the philosophical questions that arise for a different

widespread use of photography, namely, to reproduce works of art, and particularly

paintings (Savedoff t993, 1999). She maintains that relying on photographic repro

ductions and treating them as if they were transparent rather than transformative

affects the way in which we experience and think about the paintings themselves.

  PHOTOGR PHY N MOR L

KNOWLE GE

In her speculative series of essays published as On Photography Susan Sontag

echoed some of Plato s worries about the superficiality of pictorial representations.

In particular, she claimed that photographs, because they deal only with static

appearances and not with change over time, cannot provide understamlingof the

world, and so can t furnish ethical knowledge:

Strictly one never understands anything from a photograph .   n contrast to the amorous

relation which is based on how something looks understanding is based on how it func-

tions. And functioning takes place in time, and must b?explained in tIme:lJiiIjrthat whICh.e..----.....  m t ~ t e s can make us understand

l The li ll l..of photographic knowledge of the world is that, while it can goad conscience,  J it can, finally, never be ethical or political knowledge.  Sontag 1979: 23-4)-7  - ---  

Stephanie Ross  1982 drew on some of Scruton s arguments about photography to

find support for Sontag s description of photography s limitations.H ~ n c l u s i o n s

however, like Sontag s, are misleading. Photography does have a range of narrative-

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PHOTOGRAPHY 6

techniques available to it, such as the use of a series of images, or of an implied

appropriate reading of events unfolding in time, and consequently the attack-on

photography s potential to communicate about events taking place over time is

arguab y misplaced (see Warburton 1988a

TOWARDS A PHILOSOPHY OF

PHOTOGRAPHIC ART

The philosophical investigation of photographic art is still in a relatively early

phase. Few of those philosophers who have turned their attention to photography

have a<Iaressed in detail questions that arise specifically for photographic art as

opposed to photography in general. One recent exception is Barbara Savedoff in

her Transformi g Images (Savedoff1999). Savedoffstresses the transformative pow

ers of photographs: photographs transform their sll. >ject matter in various ways,

yet we cannot easily help seemg themas

recording or docUinenting reality. Rightly

or wrongly, we perceive photo   ts as more objective than paintings. This com

bin:rttOrl o eatures gives the e;:herience of viewing photographs its unioue char-  -  cter. The power of particular p otographic images to fascinate us often depends

on their t r n s f o r ~ v nature. Savedoff makes her case, which is illuminating

about our experience of photographic art, by drawing on a range of photographic

examples, including photographs of representations.

Warburton has addressed another aspect of photographic art, the question of

which photographic prints should be considered authentic or definitive, and why(Warburton 1997 . He argues that the artworld s preference for so-called vintage

prints is not generally a rational one.

  DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY

The recent invention of digital photography has already brought about many

changes in the ways photographs are used and understood. The new technology

converts an image to pixels, each of which can be electronically controlled. It has

allowed analogue images to be replaced wi h-digital ones, thus permitting exact

reproduction direct result of the fact that digital photographs   ~ emount of information. This has once again raised questions of photographic

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6 NIGEL WARBURTON

evidence: now that photographs can be so easily manipulated in virtually unde-

tectable ways, by almost anyone, without leaving the archival evidence   tamper-

ing provided by a negative, a number   writers have suggested that the days

  documentary photography are numbered. William . Mitchell, for example,

has declared that we are entering a postj,.hotographic age , a position based on

a somewhat sentimental view   photography s past:

the process of photographic image construction is highly standardized its representational

commitments  re well known and the intentional relationships of standard photographs to

their subject are relatively straightforward and unambiguous.   Mitchell 1992: 222).

More plausibly, Savedoff   1997,1999) has speculated about the possible implications  the new technology, emphasizing the 4 evitable s i ~ aesthetics   photog-

raphy once, as seems likely, the evidential authority surrounding traditional photo-

graphs is lost. Other writers Ritchin 1990; Warburton 1998) have argued that the

new technology for the most part brings to the fore issues that have always existed

for photography, such as the relationship between documentary photographs and

reality:

 n the field of photojournalism it is clear that journalistic principles and not vague photo-

graphic mythology must be invoked in attempting to maintain both an active role for the

photograph and the public s confidence. Such clarification should encourage a belated

acknowledgement of photography s subjectivity and range its different uses approaches

sources and ambitions. Photographs will have to be treated less monolithically with the

understanding that like words images can be used for a variety of purposes and can be pro-

duced according to different strategies. They may be factual or fantastic reportorial or opin-

ionated.   Ritchin 1990: 144)

Far from inevitably bringing about the demise   documentary photography, the

invention   digital photography and the range   new choices it gives photographs

should clarify its value in providing legible visual evidence that has the power to

extend our moral imaginations. The conventions   documentary photography   n

continue to exist alongside the pictorialist conventions   digital imaging, though

this is by no means inevitable.

9.  ON LUS ON

The philosophy orphotography remains a relatively une lored area   aesthetics.

There areIna:rrf frilportant questions yet to be addre oncernmg ph<rtO)Ournal-ism and photographic art, questions drawing on the philosophy   representation,

on ethics, and on the theory   criticism.

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PHOTOGRAPHY 625

See also: Painting; Film; Representation in Art; Medium in Art; Style in Art; A rt a nd

Morality; Aesthetics of Popular Art.

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