The camera obscura (literally, dark chamber) is a centuries-old device in which an image is received through a small opening and “screened” in natural color on a facing surface. At least since the Renaissance, the history of the camera obscura has been linked to artistic pursuits, as an aid for tracing images. The problem for the birth of photography (literally, writing with light) was with “fixing” the projected virtual scene. The competition was fierce as to who would do it first, and credit is usually given to Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre and Joseph-Nicéphore Niepce as long ago as 1822. But the cultural world still has not assimilated the full implications of the invention of photography, and philosophical writing has often reflected the consequences of its entry into the world of pictures.
It is fair to say that digital photography has revolutionized many of the ways we understand photographs. For example, the ease with which photographs can be technically manipulated and the seamlessness of pixelization has given pause to the evidential nature of photography’s link with computers. Digital photography has changed the way photographs are taken and destroyed and has helped to universalize its use through a variety of mobile cameras. However, many of the aesthetic issues that are relevant to traditional photography, many that go back to its origins, still remain. Walter Benjamin saw one of those issues, the mechanization of traditional photographs, as problematic for artworks generally.
There is a tendency to think of artworks as one-of-a-kind, not entirely unlike the way we think of persons. However, in his classic 1936 essay Walter Benjamin argues that, because of its peculiar capacity to produce a plurality of copies, photography has undermined our assumptions about the uniqueness of a work of art. Benjamin reflects upon the way this technology of mechanical reproduction negatively affects what he calls the traditional aura we attribute to artworks. He says, “That which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art.” Mechanical reproduction put objects in the presence of the masses on a scale that was impossible before the extended use of technology, particularly the use of the printed photograph.
Recognizing the peculiar fascination that photographs have for us, Kendall L. Walton suggests that we think of photographs the way we think of telescopes or mirrors, as aids to or instruments for seeing. He claims that through photographs we can actually see things and persons in situations that no longer exist—that, for example, we are presently seeing our dead ancestors when we look at photographs of them. Rather than explaining the realism we attribute to photographs by their resemblance to the world they depict, Walton attributes their realism to this transparency.
Roger Scruton argues that what he calls an “ideal” photography cannot be a representational work of art at all, since a camera is just a machine that can only register what is in front of it. For this reason, a photograph cannot depict something purely fictional, that is, something nonexistent. Representational works of art, however, can obviously do so. Consider paintings of mythic beings. A photograph of a person, by contrast, is only a means of gaining indirect access to the subject of the picture, which is the real object of our interest. Think of photographs of pop stars. With a genuinely artistic representation, we are interested in the picture itself; and part of what is involved in such cases is an interest in what the artist, through the picture, says or expresses about its subject matter. However, a photograph, by its nature, cannot express anything about its subject.
Approaching the supposed dichotomy between the purely fact-gathering functions of photography and its possible aesthetic powers, Flo Leibowitz examines the remarkable Hubble photographs of remote astral bodies such as nebulae. The Hubble photographs, she points out, are “unrealistic” in the sense that if we were at an appropriate vantage point in space the colors, for example, are not the colors we would see. Instead, they contain color-coded information for scientific research, which, as it happens, also accounts for their aesthetic appeal. One might ask whether the Hubble research teams are really interested in infecting audiences with the feelings of awe and wonder that their photographs inspire. Leibowitz suggests that, by all means, these teams hoped for precisely this effect.
In linking photography with architecture, Jennifer Burris writes about an interesting role photography plays in bringing to light certain aspects of urban street life. According to Burris, this new approach involves “the diffusion of themed environments like Coney Island or Disneyland into the space of everyday life.” Using digital manipulation, in part, these fantasy landscapes or non-places produce a new sense of urban reality, or rather unreality, that draws our attention to architecture and photography.
Peg Brand Weiser focuses on Leon Mostovoy’s Transfigure. Transfigure is a book of fifty nude photographs of transgender individuals. The photographs are divided into three parts so that they can be arranged in different combinations by the viewer. So, for example, a viewer might arrange the parts of the pages so that they create an image of a body that has a woman’s head, a post-op torso, and a pelvis with penis. She argues that engaging with artworks like Transfigure can help us to properly retrain our aesthetic responses to the diversity of bodies, finding beauty where we could not before.
The scenario in Plato’s famous allegory from the Republic about prisoners in a cave strikes us as an uncanny “anticipation” of the medium of cinema. Not only are its dark interior and projected wall shadows analogous to a movie theater, the prisoners, set in their face-to-the-front position, are comparable to moviegoers. (It seems natural that Orson Welles actually narrated an animated film version of Plato’s tale.) The allegory has many interpretations. It is sometimes seen as marking a distinction between appearance and reality, something like the movies, or as displaying an educational turnaround from false belief to knowledge, from darkness to light. And it is sometimes understood as Plato’s illustration of the philosopher’s situation relative to his or her alienated and disbelieving peers. Whatever the meaning of Plato’s allegory is, it is hard not to think of it as conveying a sense of one’s being in the grip of a movie’s illusion-making power.
Another set of issues in aesthetics, and in the philosophy of film specifically, can be put this way: If what we watch on the screen in front of us is the film Alien, then Alien does not exist when it is nowhere being screened. Is there something like a type called Alien, of which its individual screenings are tokens or instances and what would that be? In his essay “Towards an Ontology of the Moving Image,” Noël Carroll takes on this question. What Carroll says is that while the type/token distinction is useful, more needs to be said regarding the difference between, say, theater and motion pictures. To do this he makes use of the idea of a template—most often a film print—whereas tokens in theater are generated by interpretations, tokens in film are generated by templates. And, says Carroll, there are important aesthetic differences turning on this issue. He begins his essay by reviewing what other philosophers have to say about the nature of the moving image, the necessary conditions for film, including Arthur C. Danto’s work, which is excerpted in our next essay, “Moving Pictures,” where the overall strategy is to compare cinema with other forms of photographic projections.
Danto imagines a long motion picture of a perfectly still object, a vase for example, and a picture that would be indistinguishable, say a slide, of the same vase to make a point about the ontology of film. It is not that what we see is moving or not that makes the difference. He says,
Although nothing happens in either case, the truth of this is logically determined in the case of the slide whereas it is only a matter of a perverse artistic intention in the case of the film, where something could happen if I wished it to.
This difference makes all the difference in our expectations, even in popular feature movies. The idea of comparing perceptually indistinguishable objects of different categories, for example dreams and accurate perceptions, is a familiar Dantonian method and you can read more of his work on indistinguishable objects in his essay “Works of Art and Mere Real Things” (Chapter 9, Part I: Painting).
Laura Mulvey is also concerned with cinematic power. Situating her theory within a psychoanalytic background, Mulvey expands upon the theme of the peculiar visual pleasure we get from films by identifying the voyeuristic potency of this medium. However, the gaze that generates pleasure in the movie theater, like the “look” of the camera itself, on her view, is a fundamentally male gaze—one that typically puts women on display, thus eroticizing them and maintaining a power over their images.
Leni Riefenstahl was one of the great geniuses of moving pictures. However, her film Triumph of the Will poses a complex problem about the interface between aesthetic and moral judgments. Viewed formally, the film is hailed as a masterpiece. At the same time, it was a forceful and successful piece of Nazi propaganda. How can we manage to give credit to Riefenstahl as an artist, given the morally repugnant context in which the film was made? Mary Devereaux offers a subtle resolution of this conundrum.
Paul C. Taylor also addresses a social and morally freighted issue arising from reflecting on the movies. By reference to well-known commercial movies—The Last King of Scotland, in particular—Taylor shows why it is important to tease out the way films rely on and reinforce patterns of meaning and habits of perception and interpretations that, in turn, play important and all-too-often destructive roles in our lives outside the cinema. In more or less subtle ways, film after film can be seen as cultivating in their audiences’ habits of thinking that the experiences of white people are the ones that count and that the marginalization of people of color is acceptable and routine.