Ninth International Conference on The Image

Abstract

One of the crucial debates in contemporary philosophy of photography is whether photographic images mandate imaginings or not. Are we supposed to imagine the objects of the photograph or should we simply see and recognize what they represent? According to one of the key contributors to the debate – Kendall Walton – all analog photographs allow us to see their subjects indirectly in the sense that mirrors and binoculars allow us to see objects indirectly through the manipulation of light. But Walton claims that photographs also mandate imagining seeing the subject represented directly as though we were in the subject’s presence. I argue that this view is misplaced. The key reason Walton thinks photographs mandate imagining seeing is the need to explain a particular experience of photography and cinema – viz., the notion of presence of the objects photographed. But if it is the notion of presence that is really at stake then there is no need for invoking imagining seeing something directly. As Walton, building on André Bazin, puts it, seeing something through a photograph is like seeing something through a telescope, a microscope or a mirror. And all these visual aids are routinely seen as bringing the objects whose images they reflect closer to us, as bringing them into our presence. But if no visual aids (mirrors, telescopes, etc.) mandate imagining seeing to evoke the experience of presence, and if photographs are like other visual aids, then there is no reason to assume photographs mandate imagining seeing either.