Photography and the representation of vision

Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

Volumn 59, Issue 4, 2001, Pages 351-362

  Friday, Jonathan ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF ABERDEEN   (United Kingdom)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 61049333318     PISSN: 00218529     EISSN: 15406245     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/0021-8529.00037     Document Type: Review

References (49)

1. Ted Cohen, "What's Special About Photography," Monist 71 (1988): 292-305.
2. G. E. Lessing, Laocoön, first published 1766. Clement Greenberg, "Toward a Newer Laocoön," in The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 1, ed. J. O'Brian (University of Chicago Press, 1986).
3. Cf. Henry Fox Talbot, The Pencil of Nature. This work appeared in six installments between 1844 and 1866. A facsimile of the entire work was produced in 1969 under the editorship of Beaumont Newhall.
4. E. H. Gombrich, Joel Snyder, and Nigel Warburton are just three contemporary defenders of a strong continuity between photography and painting. Cf. Gombrich, The Image and the Eye (Oxford: Phaidon, 1982)
5. Snyder, "Picturing Vision," Critical Inquiry 6 (1980): 499-526
6. Warburton, "Varieties of Photographic Representation: Documentary, Pictorial and Quasi-documentary," History of Photography 15 (1991): 203-210
7. In addition to Ted Cohen, the view that photography is an art distinct from painting is represented by, among others, André Bazin, "The Ontology of the Photographic Image" in What Is Cinema? vol. 1, ed. Hugh Gray (University of California Press, 1967), pp. 9-16
8. Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed (Harvard University Press, 1979)
9. and Susan Sontag, On Photography (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1977).
10. Neither of the two categories of picture I will consider could be said to extend to, for example, trompe l'oeil pictures.
11. Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing (University of Chicago Press, 1983)
12. Despite my merely having borrowed Alpers's terms, rather than adopting her account of the distinction, it remains the case that this paper owes an intellectual debt to Alpers's fine study. Richard Wollheim is another theorist interested in a conception of a picture closely related to that I will call a Keplerian picture. Cf. Wollheim's discussion of Casper David Friedrich in Painting as an Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 1987), chap. 3.
13. For reasons that will be apparent by the end of this paper, many of the paintings of Magritte are studies in such ambiguity. A fine example from photography of such an ambiguous picture is Ken Josephson's Postcard Visit, Stockholm, Sweden (1967).
14. It is sometimes said that artificial perspective was a discovery of the Renaissance. Far closer to the truth, however, is that it was a recovery and adaptation of a technique known to Plato. Cf. John Hyman, The Imitation of Nature (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989).
15. Alberti, De Pictura, first published in 1435. Passages quoted are from the Cecil Grayson translation (Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1991), p. 48.
16. The sort of distinction I am drawing between Albertian and Keplerian pictures has been explored to a greater or lesser extent by a number of writers. Cf. , for example, R. K. Elliott, "Aesthetic Theory and the Experience of Art," in Aesthetics, ed. Harold Osborne (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), pp. 145-157
17. Kendall Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe (Harvard University Press, 1990)
18. Gombrich, "Mirror and Map: Theories of Pictorial Representation" in The Image and The Eye (pp. 172-214)
19. and Wollheim, Painting as an Art (pp. 101-186 passim).
20. An even better example might be the representation of the visual experience of "Scottie" suffering from his fear of heights in Vertigo.
21. An example of such extreme use of subjective camera is Robert Montgomary's 1947 film The Lady in the Lake.
22. For a discussion of the point of view shot in cinema with some relevance to the argument of this paper, see Murray Smith, "Imagining From the Inside" in Film Theory and Philosophy, ed. Richard Allen and Murray Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 412-430.
23. Details of the history of visual theory are accessibly sketched by David Park in The Fire Within the Eye (Princeton University Press, 1997).
24. Johannes Kepler, Ad Vitellionem Paralipomena, first published in 1604.
25. For example, Kepler writes: "As long as the diameters of the luminaries and the extent of their solar eclipses are noted as fundamental by astronomers . . . some deception of vision arises partly from the artifice of observing . . . and partly from vision itself . . . and thus the origins of errors in vision must be sought in the conformation and function of the eye. " Quoted in Alpers, The Art of Describing, p. 34.
26. Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding; cf. , e. g. , Book 2, Chap. 10, Section 5 or Book 4, Chap. 7, Section 16.
27. John Mackie (Problems From Locke [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976]) argues for the "picture-original" reading of Locke's representationalism.
28. Though Thomas Reid in the eighteenth century subjected the theory to powerful critical scrutiny. More recently, both Heidegger and Wittgenstein present sustained arguments against representationalist ways of thinking. Jonathan Dancy provides a good introduction to the debate between representationalists and their opponents in Contemporary Epistemology (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985).
29. The distinction between what is represented and what is depicted is a familiar one. A Keplerian picture depicts objects, scenes, etc. in the real world, but represents (a nondepicted) someone's visual experience of the (depicted) real world. Wollheim discusses the distinction between depiction and representation in Painting as an Art, as does Walton in Mimesis as Make-Believe.
30. This is not a fully satisfactory definition, since a Keplerian picture could in principle depict the one whose visual experience is represented by including in the picture the normally implicit perceiver's reflection in a mirror- for example, Parmigianino's Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. For the purposes of the argument that follows, however, we need not correct this flaw.
31. Pictures made in the Albertian mode may, however, symbolically imply (and hence represent) someone or something beyond the frame of the picture. Unlike the concept of a Keplerian picture, there is nothing in the concept of an Albertian picture that necessarily implies anything beyond the frame.
32. Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed, pp. 23-24 (some emphasis added).
33. Richter, ed. , The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (New York: Dover, 1970), chap. 1, p. 18.
34. Cf. Carl Goldstein, "The Meaning of Poussin's Letter to De Noyers," The Burlington Magazine 108 (1966): 233-239.
35. Cf. Francisco De Hollanda, Four Dialogues on Painting (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1928), pp. 15-16.
36. For example, cf. Roger Scruton, "Photography and Representation" in Scruton, The Aesthetic Understanding (London: Methuen, 1983), pp. 99. 102-126
37. or Rudolf Arnheim, "On the Nature of Photography," Critical Inquiry 1 (1974): 149-161.
38. For example, cf. Kendall Walton, 'Transparent Pictures: On the Nature of Photographic Realism," Critical Inquiry 11 (1984): 246-277.
39. Kendall Walton appeals to representationalist visual theory in support of his argument that the viewers of photographs literally see through them to the objects they depict. He writes, for example, "I don't mind allowing that we see photographed objects only indirectly. . . . One is reminded of the familiar claim that we see directly only our own sense-data or images on our retinas. What I would object to is the suggestion that that indirect seeing . . . is not really seeing, that all we actually see are sense-data or images or photographs. " Ibid. , p. 253.
40. Eugene Fromentin, The Masters of Past Time, trans. Andrew Boyle (London: Phaidon, 1948), p. 103.
41. Indeed, Richard Wollheim notes that the earth's curvature as it appears in vision from such heights is represented in the painting. See Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art, chap. 3.
42. Wittgenstein's later Philosophical Investigations, Part II, section xi is the locus classicus for the notion of aspect-perception
43. Indeed, a good deal of nineteenth-century photographic art is clearly created in the Albertian mode. Henry Fox Talbot, Peter Emerson, Gustave Reijlander, Henry Peach Robinson, Roger Fenton, Lady Hawarden, and Fred Holland Day are just a few notable names from the history of photography who pursued a more or less Albertian mode of photographic picturing.
44. André Bazin, "The Ontology of the Photographic Image. " See also Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (New York: Hill and Wang, 1980).
45. The point was powerfully made in John Szarkowski's famous 1966 exhibition of photography at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), and his subsequent critical anthology The Photographer's Eye (New York: MoMA, 1966).
46. For a discussion of the latter, see Janet Malcolm's title essay in Diana and Nikon (Boston: David Godine, 1980).
47. In this respect we should recall that photography is a distinctly technological medium among the other fine arts. One sense in which this is so follows from the large amount of scientific knowledge and machinery necessary for the invention and use of the medium. The more important sense of technology relevant to photography, however, concerns the relation between technology and increase in our capacity to do things. Patrick Maynard develops this latter line of thought about photography as a technology in The Engine of Visualization (Cornell University Press, 1997).
48. My own view is that the truth of the matter lies between these positions and remains to be fully explained.
49. In preparing this paper, I have benefited from the comments of a number of people. Particular thanks go to Patrick Maynard, Gregory Currie, Gordon Graham, and the other participants at a one-day seminar on aesthetics and technology organized under the aegis of the Center for Philosophy, Technology, and Society at Aberdeen University in the Spring of 1999. Further acknowledgment is owed to an anonymous referee whose helpful comments were of great assistance.