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. (shrink)

An extract from this unpublished article is published in Neill & Ridley (eds.) Arguing about Art (2007).

This article contains a survey of recent debates in the philosophy of photography, focusing on aesthetic and epistemic issues in particular. Starting from widespread notions about automatism, causality and realism in the theory of photography, the authors ask whether the prima facie tension between the epistemic and aesthetic embodied in oppositions such as automaticism and agency, causality and intentionality, realism and fictional competence is more than apparent. In this context, the article discusses recent work by Roger Scruton, Dominic Lopes, Kendall (...) Walton, Gregory Currie, Jonathan Cohen and Aaron Meskin, Noël Carroll, and Patrick Maynard in some detail. Specific topics addressed include: aesthetic scepticism, transparency, imagination, perception, information, representation and depiction. (shrink)