This article addresses the portrait as a philosophical form of art. Portraits seek to render the subjective objectively visible. In portraiture two fundamental aims come into conflict: the revelatory aim of faithfulness to the subject, and the creative aim of artistic expression. In the first part of my paper, studying works by Rembrandt, I develop a typology of four different things that can be meant when speaking of an image’s power to show a person: accuracy, testimony of presence, emotional characterization, (...) or revelation of the essential “air” (to use Roland Barthes’ term). In the second half of my paper this typology is applied to examples from painting and photography to explore how the two media might differ. I argue that, despite photography’s alleged ‘realism’ and ‘transparency,’ it allows for artistic portraiture and presents the same basic conflict between portraiture’s two aims, the revelatory and the expressive. (shrink)

Medical imaging is predominantly a visual field. In this context, prenatal ultrasound images assume intense social, ethical, and psychological significance by virtue of the subject they represent: the fetus. This feature, along with the sophistication introduced by three-dimensional ultrasound imaging that allows improved visualization of the fetus, has contributed to the common impression that prenatal ultrasound scans are like photographs of the fetus. In this article we discuss the consistency of such a comparison. First, we investigate the epistemic role of (...) both analogic and digital photographic images as visual information-providing representations holding a high degree of objectivity. Second, we examine the structure and process of production of ultrasound scans and argue that a comparison between two-dimensional ultrasound and photography is justified. This is in contrast to 3D ultrasound images that, due to the intensive mathematical processing involved in their production, present some structural issues that obfuscate their ontological and epistemic status. (shrink)

Kendall Walton argued that photographs are transparent, that we literally see things through them. This claim provoked many objections, and one line of argument has focused on the fact that when we see objects in ordinary situations we see their approximate location with respect to us, whereas in typical photographs we do not. The author argues, however, that this egocentric spatial information is not what distinguishes literal seeing from typical photograph seeing. Instead of it, the author proposes two conditions for (...) normal, literal seeing. One is that the seeing be real-time, and the other is that the image be “empty”. Some photographic images meet these conditions. (shrink)

In this essay I want to take some metaphors seriously. I want to push at their limits and ask whether this exercise can help us think differently about photographs and their relationship to what they depict. (Should it be ‘what they depict’ or ‘what they are seen as depicting’? The choice of phrasing depends on theoretical position: is depiction inherent in the image, or is it seen by the viewer?). The moel of citationality based on Cadava’s work is developed by (...) exploring in more detail the variety of bibliographic ciataions. (shrink)