Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-q99xh Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-25T08:13:51.107Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Real Challenge to Photography (as Communicative Representational Art)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 June 2015

ROBERT HOPKINS
ROBERT HOPKINS*
Affiliation:
NEW YORK [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract:

I argue that authentic photography is not able to develop to the full as a communicative representational art. Photography is authentic when it is true to its self-image as the imprinting of images. For an image to be imprinted is for its content to be linked to the scene in which it originates by a chain of sufficient, mind-independent causes. Communicative representational art (in any medium: photography, painting, literature, music, etc.) is art that exploits the resources of representation to achieve artistically interesting communication of thought. The central resources of representation are content, vehicle properties, and the interplay between these two. Whereas painting and other representational arts are able to exploit all three to communicate thought, authentic photography can exploit interplay only to a very limited degree. However, the exploitation of interplay is the culmination of communicative representational art: the natural endpoint in its development.

Keywords

aestheticsphilosophy of artphotographypainting
Type
Articles
Information
Journal of the American Philosophical Association , Volume 1 , Issue 2 , Summer 2015 , pp. 329 - 348
Copyright
Copyright © American Philosophical Association 2015 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Batchen, Geoffrey. (1997) Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Campany, David. (2003) Art and Photography. London: Phaidon.Google Scholar
Campany, David. (2011) Jeff Wall: Picture for Women. Afterall Books.Google Scholar
Davies, David. (2008) ‘How Photographs “Signify”: Cartier Bresson's “Reply” to Scruton’. In Walden, Scott (ed.), Photography and Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell), 167–86.Google Scholar
Grice, Paul. (1989) Studies in the Ways of Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Hopkins, Robert. (2005) ‘Aesthetics, Experience, and Discrimination’. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 63, 119–33.Google Scholar
Hopkins, Robert. (2012) ‘Factive Pictorial Experience: What's Really Special about Photographs?’ Nous, 46, 709–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
King, William. (1992) ‘Scruton and the Reasons for Looking at Photographs’. British Journal of Aesthetics, 32, 258–68.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Krauss, Rosalind. (1981) ‘The Photographic Conditions of Surrealism’. October, 19, 3–34.Google Scholar
Lopes, Dominic McIver. (2003) ‘The Aesthetics of Photographic Transparency’. Mind, 112, 432–48.Google Scholar
Maynard, Patrick. (1997) The Engine of Visualization: Thinking Through Photography. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Podro, Michael. (1998) Depiction. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Schwarte, Ludger. (2008) ‘Die Kunst der Leerstelle: Sprachlosigkeit als Voraussetzung der Verständigung’. In Gronau, Barbara and Lagaay, Alice (eds.), Performanzen des Nicht-Tuns (Vienna: Passagen), 33–44.Google Scholar
Scruton, Roger. (1981) ‘Photography and Representation’. Critical Inquiry, 7, 577–603.Google Scholar
Snyder, Joel, and Allen, Neil Walsh. (1975) ‘Photography, Vision, and Representation’. Critical Inquiry, 2, 143–69.Google Scholar
Sontag, Susan. (1978) On Photography. New York: Penguin.Google Scholar
Walton, Kendall. (1984) ‘Transparent Pictures: On the Nature of Photographic Realism’. Critical Inquiry, 11, 246–77.Google Scholar
Warburton, Nigel. (1996) ‘Individual Style in Photographic Art’. British Journal of Aesthetics, 36, 389–97.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wicks, Robert. (1989) ‘Photography as a Representational Art’. British Journal of Aesthetics, 29, 1–9.Google Scholar