Demonic curiosity and the aesthetics of documentary photography

British Journal of Aesthetics

Volumn 40, Issue 3, 2000, Pages 356-375

  Friday, Jonathan ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF ABERDEEN   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 63149139082     PISSN: 00070904     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/bjaesthetics/40.3.356     Document Type: Article

References (29)

1. Graham Clarke, The Photograph (Oxford: Oxford U.P., 1997), p. 145.
2. Plato, Phaedrus, 244-245c
3. Lionel Trilling, 'Art and Neurosis', in The Liberal Imagination (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), p. 168.
4. Cf. Kenneth Clark, The Romantic Rebellion (London: John Murray, 1973), p. 185.
5. This is so despite certain classical influences remaining apparent within the painting. Cf. Stephen Eisenman, Nineteenth Century Art: A Critical History (London: Thames & Hudson, 1994).
6. Cf. Clark, Romantic Rebellion, p. 185. Clark notes that although the final painting does not depict the rescue ship, Gericault's studies for the painting clearly include this element. It is perhaps left out of the final painting because the composition is sufficient to imply the existence of the ship on the horizon just beyond the picture's boundaries.
7. As Stephen Eisenman points out, the need to achieve success with Raft of the Medusa and a residual classicism, keep Géricault from giving an accurate rendition of the state of, for example, the skin of those on the raft after so long at sea. Cf. Eisenman, Nineteenth Century Art, p. 66.
8. Lorenz Eitner, Céricault, His Life and Work (London: Orbis, 1983).
9. For example, Andre Bazin, 'The Ontology of the Photographic Image', in What is Cinema, vol. 1, trans. Hugh Gray, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967);
10. Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed (Cambridge: Harvard U.P., 1971);
11. Kendall Walton, 'Transparent Pictures: On the Nature of Photographic Realism', Critical Inquiry, vol. 11 (December 1984), pp. 246-277;
12. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill & Wang, 1980);
13. Patrick Maynard, 'The Secular Icon: Photography and the Functions of Images', Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 42, no. 2 (Winter 1983), pp. 155-169;
14. Roger Scruton, 'Photography and Representation', in The Aesthetic Understanding (London: Methuen, 1983).
15. For a dissenting view, see Joel Snyder and Neil Allen, 'Photography, Vision and Representation', Critical Inquiry, vol. 1 (Autumn 1975), pp. 143-169.
16. Cf. Hala Beloff, Camera Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985).
17. This criterion of a distinctively aesthetic interest, in terms of a logical pattern of reasons given for attending to appropriate objects, was first suggested by Roger Scruton in Art and Imagination, (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982).
18. The idea is developed further by Mark Rowe in 'The Definition of Art', Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 41 (July 1991) pp. 271-286.
19. Scruton, 'Photography and Representation', p. 115.
20. For a critical discussion of Scruton's arguments see Gregory Currie, Image and Mind: Film, Philosophy and Cognitive Science (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 1995);
21. William King, 'Scruton and Reasons for Looking at Photographs', British Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 32, no. 3 (July 1992), pp. 258-265.
22. Moreover, if what the photograph 'says' in addition to its documentation is so at variance with spectators' moral understanding, then aesthetic attention may prove difficult, worrying, and inappropriate. For example, if the message of a documentary photograph was something like 'Look at how funny suffering can be', then the admiration of the photographic means to the establishment of this meaning would be pathological or evil however brilliantly it was achieved - if indeed a photograph with such meaning is even possible. The discomfort that Leni Riefenstahl's notorious film Triumph of the Will causes contemporary spectators provides an analogous, if less extreme, example. Cf. Mary Deveraux, 'Beauty and Evil: The Case of Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will', in Levinson (ed.) Aesthetics and Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 1998).
23. Such institutional evidence includes exhibitions, collections, and publications devoted to documentary photography. The thought that social and institutional facts are determinate of the identity of art is associated (most notably) with Arthur Danto and George Dickie. Cf. Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard U.P., 1981);
24. George Dickie, Introduction to Aesthetics (Oxford: Oxford U.P., 1997). The 'institutional theory of art' with which they are associated has been criticized extensively. In invoking such institutional facts in the course of my argument I am not endorsing that theory. Rather, my point is merely that the fact of documentary photography being treated by many as an art stands in need of explaining if scepticism about the appropriateness of aesthetic attention is to be accepted.
25. Cf. Janet Malcolm, Diana and Nikon (Boston, MA: Godine, 1980), p. 83.
26. Cf. Beloff's discussion of Avedon, Camera Culture
27. and Janet Malcolm's reflections, Diana and Nikon;
28. Don McCullin, Is Anyone Taking Any Notice? (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1973),
29. In a number of interviews McCullin has reflected upon this interest and the damage that it has inflicted upon his psyche; Lange is discussed and quoted by Clarke, Romantic Rebellion, pp. 151-153.