Photography, philosophy and art.

1. PHOTOGRAPHY
and
PHILOSOPHY
Prepared by Raizza Corpuz

2. A philosophy of photography
• is necessary for raising photographic practice
to the level of consciousness, and this is
again because this practice gives rise to a
model of freedom in the post-industrial context
in general.
• must reveal the fact that there is no place for
human freedom within the area of automated,
programmed and programming apparatuses, in
order finally to show a way in which it is
nevertheless possibl

3. pho·tog·ra·phy
• The word "photography" was created from
the Greek roots (phōtos), genitive of φῶς (phōs),
"light“ and (graphé) "representation by means of
lines" or "drawing",
MEANS: "drawing with light“
N. the art or practice of
taking and
processing photographs

4. A GREAT ARTIST
CAN MAKE ART BY
SIMPLY CASTING A
GLANCE. –SMITHSON

5. Photographic Art
• Thomas Struth's "115 Street at 2nd Avenue,
Harlem, New York" (1978). Credit Thomas Struth

6. Jeff Wall
considers his own
to be in dialogue,
irrespective of
differences of
media.

7. Philosophy of photography
• a respectable fine art medium in its own right
and as one medium among many that are available
to contemporary artists…

8. Michael Fried: Its most original contribution is to
bring this art theoretical and critical background into
dialogue with cognate debates in the philosophy of
photography, of which art theorists seldom demonstrate
much awareness

9. Philosophy of photography is a
relatively new subdomain of
analytic aesthetics
R. Scruton on PHILO-PHOTOG
• that photographs cannot be
representational art
• the “ideal photograph” (understood in
a logical rather than a normative
sense) cannot be representational art)

10. That:
• it is impossible to have an aesthetic interest
in a photograph as a photograph—which on
Scruton’s account implies something made by
strictly photographic means
• are solely causal traces of the objects
responsible for them they cannot express
thoughts in this sense

11. Walton’s claim that photographs
are transparent
• photographs do not depend on the mental states
of the photographer but simply record how
things stood in a given portion of the world at
a given time.

12. • photographic depiction is
independent of the intentions of the
photographer in the respect that
counts
• for philosophers human agency is the
sole domain of freedom, for many
artists there is something arid, not
to say mechanistic, in the idea of a
world in which all our purposes
result in predictable consequences,
where we are completely transparent
to ourselves and where intentions
always result in expected actions.

13. Thus, Open up a space of
freedom
The task of a philosophy of photography is to reflect upon this
possibility of freedom -

14. TOWARDS A PHILOSOPHY OF
PHOTOGRAPHY
and thus its significance - in a world dominated by apparatuses; to
reflect upon the way in which, despite everything, it is possible
for human beings to give significance to their lives in face of the
chance necessity of death.
Such a philosophy is necessary because it
is the only form of revolution left open
to us.

16. References
• Photography between ART and HISTORY by Diarmuid
Costello and Margaret Iversen
• TOWARDS A PHILOSOPHY OF PHOTOGRAPHY by Vilém
Flusser