Experiencing Photographs Qua Photographs: What's So Special about Them?

• Main Author: Jiri Benovsky
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Contemporary Aesthetics, Inc. 2013-01-01
• Series: Contemporary Aesthetics
• Subjects: digital photography; metaphysics; painting; perception; phenomenology
• Online Access: http://www.contempaesthetics.org/newvolume/pages/article.php?articleID=673

Merely rhetorically and answering in the negative, Kendall Walton has asked: "Isn't photography just another method people have of making pictures, one that merely uses different tools and materials; cameras, photosensitive paper, and darkroom equipment, rather than canvas, paint, and brushes? And don't the results differ only contingently and in degree, not fundamentally, from pictures of other kinds?" Contrary to Walton and others, I answer with a resounding "Yes" to Walton’s questions in this article. It is a widely shared view that photographs are somehow special and that they fundamentally differ from hand-made pictures such as paintings, both from a phenomenological point of view (in the way we experience them) and an epistemic point of view (since they are supposed to have a different that is, greater, epistemic value from paintings that gives us a privileged access to the world). I almost reject the totality of these claims and, as a consequence, there remains little difference between photographs and paintings. As we shall see, “photographs are always partly paintings,” a claim that is true not only of retouched digital photographs but of all photographs, including traditional ones made using photosensitive film and development techniques.