Dominic McIver Lopes

Even as art theory and analytic philosophy have failed to connect in their studies of photography, the two disciplines have joined in tying conceptions of the specific character of photography to ideas about automaticity and agency.1 In rough caricature, the philosopher reasons: “An item is a work of art only insofar as it is the product of agency, so a photograph is not an art work insofar it is not the product of artistic agency. After all, in Lady Eastlake's colorful words, the ‘obedience of the machine’ in photography is no ‘picturesque agent.’”2 This much is accepted both by philosophers who go on to conclude that photography is not an art and also by those who defend the contrary.3 The reasoning on the side of theory and criticism often goes, again in caricature, as follows: “Art works sometimes result from a suppression of agency, and the distinctive ‘obedience of the machine’ in photography is no ‘picturesque agent,’ so the automatism of the photographic machine shapes the distinctive profile of photographic art.” The triadic assemblage of the medium, automatism, and agency is clearly more than a trope in writing on photography; it regulates and structures reasoning about photography, even as it sends that reasoning off in remarkably divergent directions in different disciplines. In the spirit of the nudge towards convergence that this special issue represents, this afterword develops some thoughts that are sparked by and that offer a friendly challenge to the preceding papers. In brief, the triad that controls thinking about photography across disciplines depends on some rather demanding conceptions of agency and automatism. As it turns out, less demanding conceptions of agency and automatism pave the way to a new and more modest conception of the specificity of photography as an art medium. If our common ground is what keeps us apart, perhaps we should find some new common ground?

True to his plan to take photographs to find out what things look like photographed, Garry Winogrand liked to delay processing his exposed rolls in order to scrub the memory of what he had in mind when he tripped the shutter. In a rich and astute essay, Walter Benn Michaels puts Winogrand in company with G. E. M. Anscombe. One through photography, the other through philosophy, each explores, articulates, even plays up, the “difficulties” of making sense of what it is for an act to be structured by intentions. Thus Benn Michaels enlists Anscombe and Winogrand in a protest against a recent maneuver of mine that would dflate the difficulties that seem to come with the exercise of photographic agency.2 The reply is that Benn Michaels’s insights are spot on, but they do not block the deflationary maneuver. What happens in Benn Michaels’s reasoning is that new and interesting difficulties get raised about photographic meaning; I propose to deflate them too.

Pleasure is standardly conceived as a state that motivates. This chapter considers three accounts of disinterested pleasure as motivating. On one, it motivates strictly internal states because it is non-conceptual. On a second, it motivates strictly internal states because the link between motivating internal states and world-oriented acts has been inhibited. On the third, it motivates only contemplative acts. All three accounts are coherent. However, none of the three accounts of disinterested pleasure is an account of aesthetic pleasure, where aesthetic pleasure serves either to demarcate aesthetic values or to explain why facts about aesthetic value are reason-giving. The conclusion is that we have no reason to appeal to disinterested pleasure in aesthetics.

Hypotheses in aesthetics should explain appreciative failure as well as appreciative success. They should state the general conditions under which people fail to understand and value works as works of art. This stricture is all the more important when the typical response to conceptual art is one of resistance. Some philosophers explain this by claiming that conceptual art violates traditional theories of art. Others say that it violates folk ontologies of art. In fact, the appreciative failure to which conceptual art is prone is a consequence of the fact that it is not visual art, as it appears to be; rather it is an entirely new art form. Works in new art forms pose special challenges to appreciation. Identifying these challenges enriches theorizing about art.

The theory that photographs are images made by belief‐independent feature‐tracking is not a philosopher's invention. It gives concise, precise, and unifying expression to an assemblage of ideas about photography with a long and influential history. Traditional theory ironically flubs the line between photography and drawing precisely because it attempts to put them in opposition to each other. Photographs made by drawing can have a special significance because they originate in richly embodied action with a distinctive expressive character. Making marks by printing has different expressive resources. Photography avails itself of the expressive power of printing and drawing too. The new theory of photography prevails over the traditional theory if it helps to make sense of how the authors use photographs in art and communication. The traditional theory was developed partly in order to explain photographs’ special epistemic power.

Essential readings in the philosophy of literature are brought together for the first time in this anthology. Contains forty-five substantial and carefully chosen essays and extracts Provides a balanced and coherent overview of developments in the field during the past thirty years, including influential work on fiction, interpretation, metaphor, literary value, and the definition and ontology of literature Includes an additional historical section featuring generous selections of the writings of early pioneers such as Plato, Aristotle, Nietzsche, and Hume Serves as an ideal introduction to the philosophy of literature or the philosophy of art, as well as a handy compilation of contributions to the field by its leading figures

Having been invented by scientists, who first saw it as a new tool of inquiry and only later began to suspect the possibility of photographic art, photography's special epistemic character has dominated thinking about its nature. Photographs are introduced as evidence in scientific reports, journalism, and courts of law. They can also be used to make discoveries. According to the new theory of photography, a photograph is a product of a photographic process where an artifactual image is rendered from a photographic event that records information in a light image of a pro‐photographic scene. One class of photographic practices is epistemic, centering on norms that restrict the photographic process in order to ensure belief‐independent feature‐tracking. For historical reasons, this restricted conception of photography dominated both the design of the technology and its use. It would be perfectly accurate to call the epistemically centered practice as standard photography.

Photography is probably the first art to have developed alongside and in tandem with systematic thinking about its nature. Photography theory has always been implicated in photographic creativity and appreciation. Methodological skepticism treats the skeptic's argument as a tool by taking it seriously in a rather special way. In this chapter, philosophy has been used to bring out some hidden structures in the thinking that obscure photography's range of powers. A second art of photography, exemplified by some important art made since the 1980s, stands up to the assumption that thoughts cannot be expressed where there is depiction by belief‐independent feature‐tracking. Lyric photography is our third art, which questions whether photography is depiction by belief‐independent feature‐tracking, and which conceives photography as means of fashioning marked surfaces from recording events. Finally, since art need not be representational, a fourth art of photography foregrounds form over content.

This chapter uses the patterns of inference that the authors find in the history to understand how photography can be practiced as an art. The history contains the makings of some sophisticated reasoning for the skeptical claim that photography is not an art. The argument for skepticism about photographic art brings on questions about the nature of photography and when it is an art. Purity is a tool designed to sharpen the question of whether photographs can be works of art by nature. The nature of photography is depiction by belief‐independent feature‐tracking. Belief‐independent feature‐tracking is incompatible with depictively expressed thought. Photography is a signaling system wherein individual photographs are cues to the appearance of depicted scenes. Drawing is another signaling system of the same type, since drawings also cue the appearance of depicted scenes. Unlike drawings, though, photographs are reliably honest signals.

Philosophers have championed contextualist and relativist semantics for aesthetic discourse that attempt to explain faultless disagreement. However, both types of semantics do a good job explaining faultless disagreement. As a rule, more explananda assist in theory choice. This chapter proposes that three more facts need explaining. Aesthetic disputes revolve around objects, even as they express attitudes. They also extend into lengthy exchanges wherein reasons are offered and withdrawn. Finally, they play a role in the formation and regulation of aesthetic practices. Different views about the point of aesthetic disputes interpret these three facts differently. One option has it that we use aesthetic disputes to align with peers who share the same preferences. This option is friendly to relativist semantics. The alternative states that we use aesthetic disputes to coordinate language and concepts to fit aesthetic genres. This option mandates contextualist semantics. The weight of evidence tilts towards contextualism.

A theory of aesthetic normativity states what makes it the case that the fact that an item is beautiful is reason to appreciate it. Aesthetic hedonists characteristically hold that the fact that an item is beautiful is reason to appreciate it because anyone always has reason to do what yields pleasure. Bernard Bolzano was an aesthetic hedonist who is best interpreted as offering a mixed theory of aesthetic normativity. The fact that an item is beautiful is reason to appreciate it because anyone always has reason to do what yields pleasure and because anyone also has reason to do what fosters virtue, the capacity to act well. The argument for this interpretation knits together Bolzano’s aesthetics, his ethics, and his philosophy of science. In doing so, this argument opens up a new perspective on aesthetic normativity.

What are pictures good for? “Nothing” recurs as the apparently irrepress- ible reply of a motley collection iconophobes from Plato to the mediaeval iconoclasts, to parents concerned about comic books, to postmoderns in a lather over “scopic regimes”. In the aftermath of Nelson Goodman’s Languages of Art (1976), philosophers doubled down on theories of depiction and pictorial experience, but they have not rushed to work on the value of pictures. Those few who have written about pictorial value have taken for granted an approach aptly dubbed “psychologism” (Wol- lheim 1987; Hopkins 1997; Lopes 2005). According to psychologism, we can understand pictorial value by appealing only to cognitive traits and capacities. Yet psychologism is enough out of step with studies of pic- tures outside philosophy that it dampens philosophy’s impact on the very scholars who could most use a defense of pictorial value. Here is a thesis: psychologism is false. Here is its payoff: an alternative to psychologism better suits the work of scholars outside philosophy.

What you see can shape how you feel, and the route from seeing to feeling sometimes involves empathy – as you might empathize with a woman you see grieving the death of her child. But empathy also comes from what you see in pictures. Bellini's Pieta? is one among many paintings, drawings, prints, and photographs that evoke empathy – and are designed to do so. Going further, it seems that episodes of empathy triggered by pictures can help build up a person's capacity for empathic response. Indeed, they do so by fortifying the link between seeing and empathy in a distinctive way. To establish this thesis, we need a broad conception of empathic response and also the right conception of what we see in pictures.

Settling down after the big meal at the family reunion brings on a little nostalgia. Out come the photo albums. As the pages turn, you see familiar faces as they looked long ago. One photo shows a surprisingly sexy young woman, and you exclaim, "That's Aunt Jane!" What you say is true. The explanation is this: what you say is true in part because the picture puts you in the same kind of position with respect to Aunt Jane as the position you are in when you see her face to face. In general, (DR) Pictures perceptually ground demonstrative reference to depicted objects. This chapter makes a case for DR.

According to a core tenet of contemporary philosophy, aesthetic properties are primarily represented in experiences. Obviously, however, the tenet does not apply in any straightforward manner to many items that nevertheless seem to have aesthetic properties. Examples include literary works, mathematical objects, scientific ideas, and works of conceptual art. Aesthetic properties need not be represented in perceptual experiences, but what is an experience if not a perceptual state? This paper adapts Fred Dretske’s distinction between analogue and digital representation to develop a broad conception of a kind of state that is an experience but need not be perceptual. Aesthetic properties are primarily represented in states so conceived.

Methodological skepticism is a tool for articulating when photography can be practiced as an art, where each art is seen as standing up to one of the main planks of the skeptic's argument. The authors look at photographs that use belief‐independent feature tracking to duplicate scenes and thereby express thoughts. Crisscrossing the second art of photography is a tangled web of post‐conceptual artistic programs. Mimic is an example of what Jeff Wall calls near documentaries. The customary practice of for photographers in the second art is to take photographs in a documentary mode. The thoughts expressed in cast photographs are better viewed as thematic materials (the feminine, the artist, the activity of seeing, social agency) than propositions to be assessed as true or false. Thematic materials are expressed better by telling stories, making pictures, or finding ways to nudge us into points of view.

The critic Dominic Eichler recently described some abstract photographs by Wolfgang Tillmans as exposing a forgotten reservoir of unseen pictures, a kind of mysterious, enormous underbelly of photography past and present. Modernist period abstract photography shared the ambition of the classic tradition to open up a window into a hitherto unseen reality. Photography's having made realistic depiction a trivial achievement, painters tacked toward an exploration of light and form. The effects of this new direction first made their mark on figurative painting. A tonic dose of methodological skepticism remedies the sidelining of abstract photography. Abstract photographs are images that depict by belief‐independent feature tracking, reveal little of interest about the visual world, and communicate no special thoughts. The grip of the representational theory of art has been most tenacious when it comes to photography, because it has seemed entangled with the traditional theory of photography.