The Question Concerning Photography - warwick.ac.uk · Heidegger’s claims about great art occasioning a “strife between world and earth” are likely to ap-pearuninformativeatbestandgrandioseatworst

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DIARMUID COSTELLO

The Question Concerning Photography

i. THE question concerning photography?

What do Martin Heidegger’s writings on art andtechnology and recent debates in analytic philoso-phy of photography have in common? Prima facie,very little. Even the weaker suggestion that theremight be some common ground against which toassess their competing claims about some sharedobject of enquiry seems implausible. Nonetheless,in this article I bring Heidegger’s claims about artand technology into dialogue with Kendall Wal-ton’s work on photography. The impetus for doingso comes from noticing, their differences notwith-standing, some points of contact that may havegone unremarked for no better reason than thatfew philosophers are given to reading both. Morespecifically, I address the following three issues:

1. The extent to which the “mind-independ-ence” thesis underwriting analytic philoso-phy of photography since Walton partakesof the antisubjectivism of Heidegger’s phi-losophy of art more generally

2. Whether photography, as understood byanalytic philosophers of art, is capable ofmeeting Heidegger’s key criterion of au-thentic art, namely, that it provides a “de-cisive confrontation” with technology

3. Whether Heidegger and Walton’s theoriesof art and photography are not equally con-tentious, insofar as they do agree, with re-gard to the role that artist and photographerplay in their respective accounts.

Given Heidegger’s conception of technology, onthe one hand, as the “supreme danger,” because itreduces the significance of all beings to their utility

(flexibility, availability, and so on) as a resource,and photography’s tendency to reduce the worldto an aesthetic resource, on the other, it seems un-likely that photography could embody the “sav-ing power” of art. It seems much more likely thatphotography embodies precisely the problem thatgreat art is supposed to contest on the Heidegge-rian story. But whether photography does, or atleast could, fulfill such a role depends largely onwhat is involved in understanding photography asan art—as opposed to, say, a collection of pros-thetic aids to vision. In Heideggerian terms, thisis to ask: how might art resist technology whenthe art in question is photography? From a Hei-deggerian perspective, this would be the questionconcerning photography.

From the perspective of analytic philosophy ofphotography, by contrast, the question concern-ing photography would be whether the role ofmind in the formation of photographic pictures issufficiently distinctive to distinguish photographsin kind from other forms of depiction. Whateverresistance Walton’s claim that photographs are“transparent” may have elicited, his more funda-mental claim that photographic depiction is mind-independent in a way that distinguishes it fromall nonmechanical forms of depiction has beenwidely accepted.1 My goal is to show that thesetwo questions, the Heideggerian one about howphotography as an art might resist technology andthe Waltonian one about the role of mind in pho-tographic depiction, are mutually implicating.

One might have various worries about thisproject. I will mention only the three that strikeme most forcefully. There are doubtless others.

The first worry is, when trying to bring suchdifferent bodies of thought together, how differ-ent their underlying assumptions are. Analytic

c© 2012 The American Society for Aesthetics


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102 The Media of Photography

philosophy of art tends to be descriptive ratherthan normative: insofar as it takes existing prac-tices of art as data for theory building, its claimsneed to be consistent with everything that in-formed critical practice takes to be in the relevantdomain. Call this the “critical practice” constraint.As a result, analytic philosophy of art is not typi-cally in the business of asking whether everythingin the domain should be in the domain, or whetherthe artworld is justified in its practices: such prac-tices are a presupposition of philosophical inquirygetting off the ground. As such, analytic philoso-phy of art tends to be resolutely nonnormative. Toput it in a slogan: counterexamples matter.

Heidegger’s theory of art, by contrast, is norma-tive all the way down. Where one counterexamplewould worry an analytic philosopher of art, Hei-degger’s theory of art, if correct, is more at riskof exemplification than counter-exemplification.On Heidegger’s account, almost everything called‘art’ today is wrongly so called; if he is right, onewould expect his theory to be largely inapplica-ble to art in its recent forms. The worry for Hei-deggerians is thus the inverse of analytic philoso-phers’ fear of counter-exemplification. As a con-sequence, to most analytic philosophers of art,Heidegger’s claims about great art occasioning a“strife between world and earth” are likely to ap-pear uninformative at best and grandiose at worst.Conversely, from a continental perspective, thesignificance Heidegger attributes to great art asa cultural and historical horizon is likely to makethe definitional and taxonomic projects of ana-lytic philosophy of art appear rather meager bycomparison.2

The second worry about trying to bring Heideg-ger and analytic philosophy of photography intodialogue is largely a function of the first, namely,how different the literatures surrounding the laterHeidegger and Walton are as a result. The for-mer typically confines itself to explicating the in-ternal structure of Heidegger’s thought; it seldomcritically examines the justification for his claimsin ways that would give skeptics reason to thinkthey ought to engage seriously with it. One worrynon-Heideggerians might have is how Heideggercould be in a position to know what he claimsto know about various dispensations or “send-ings” of Being, including the “supreme danger”represented by our own. Heideggerians, if theywant to be taken seriously by non-Heideggerianson this score, cannot reply in a way that presup-

poses the truth of Heidegger’s premises, for it isprecisely the truth of those premises that is inquestion.3

The literature on Walton could not be moredifferent in tone, consisting of an almost scholas-tic exchange of arguments and counterargumentsas to whether his claims about photographic de-piction cohere with our intuitions. In one recentsequence of exchanges, the persuasiveness of Wal-ton’s argument (that if we are willing to accept thatwe see objects with the mediation of mirrors, wehave no reason not to accept that we see objectsthrough photographs) was deemed to hang on thenumber and orientation of the mirrors involved.Beyond the point at which they cease to preserveinformation about the spatiotemporal location ofthe objects seen relative to their perceivers, it nolonger cohered with his critics’ intuitions to saythat we see those objects.4

For Heideggerians, such debates only serve tobeg the important question: appealing to our in-tuitions about what we feel inclined to say aboutparticular cases can hardly serve as the final ar-biter if those intuitions are themselves a productof (to put it in Heideggerian terms) an impover-ished conception of Being. That is, the reflection ofa limited, historically and culturally circumscribedconception of what it is to relate to entities in gen-eral. If that is correct, appeals to our intuition arelikely to entrench rather than resolve the prob-lem. Analytic philosophers of art, if they want tobe taken seriously by those who do not share theirmethodological assumptions on this score, cannotpresuppose the force of appeals to intuition whenit is precisely the force of such appeals that is inquestion.

The third, and potentially most damaging,worry for my project of trying to think the twotogether is also largely a function of the first:even if it could be shown that something funda-mental about both accounts may be captured insimilar formulations, given how different their re-spective starting points are, one may doubt thatthis sheds much light on their underlying commit-ments. Given how different their starting pointsare, similar sounding claims may have altogetherdifferent connotations.

But I am going set all such worries to one sidehere, if only to find out, in the spirit of approachingtwo philosophers outside the well-defined tracksof the standard debates on either, whether theproject of bringing them into dialogue has wings.


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Costello The Question Concerning Photography 103

Only the results will show whether any initial sus-pension of belief was warranted.

ii. heidegger on TECHNE and TECHNIK

For Heidegger, “the question concerning technol-ogy” concerns its essence as a way of disclosingthe nature of beings in general, and how we mightachieve a “free relation” to technology so con-strued: that is, a relation that no longer so overde-termines our understanding of beings as a whole,ourselves included, as to preclude all other ways ofunderstanding them. Drawing on a Greek concep-tion of techne, Heidegger suggests that, becauseboth art and technology are at bottom ways of “un-concealing” beings, art may harbor the prospectof a “decisive confrontation” with the essence oftechnology from out of its essence:

Because the essence of technology is nothing technolog-ical, essential reflection upon technology and decisiveconfrontation with it must happen in a realm that is, onthe one hand, akin to the essence of technology and, onthe other, fundamentally different from it . . .

Such a realm is art [that] the more questioningly weponder the essence of technology, the more mysteriousthe essence of art becomes.5

To assess this claim, it is necessary to know whatHeidegger thinks art (techne) and technology(Technik) have in common, and within that com-monality, what sets them apart. What they have incommon, for Heidegger, is that both art and tech-nology are “modes of disclosure” (aletheuein),ways in which beings in general are brought tolight, together with the underlying assumptionsas to what beings are, that such modes of disclo-sure reveal. What sets them apart, accordingly, iswhat differentiates them as modes of disclosure.On Heidegger’s account, this is the difference be-tween “bringing forth” (hervorbringen) and “chal-lenging forth” (herausfordern).

Both techne and phusis (nature) are forms ofpoiesis, or “bringing forth.” Phusis is the highestform of poiesis because it is the bringing forth ofthat which discloses itself from out of itself or,more simply, of what has its power of disclosurewithin itself. Think of a bud bursting into bloom.6

Techne, by contrast, is the bringing forth of thatwhich has its power of disclosure in another; it is

an assisted form of disclosure. Think, for exam-ple, of a sculptor releasing the figure “slumber-ing” within the block, as Michelangelo is reputedto have claimed about his unfinished slaves. So un-derstood, techne retains its connection to phusis: itenables what is coming into appearance to appear.Michelangelo does not simply impose his will onthe block, he “releases,” to put it in Heidegge-rian terms, what is already “coming to presence”within it. By remaining responsive to the possi-bilities inherent within the stone, Michelangelo“completes” nature’s work. Techne remains hand-maiden to phusis: it is nature’s self-emergence thatcomes to fruition in the artist’s work.7

Where techne respects nature’s reticence, withwhich it works in concert, Technik severs this re-lation to nature’s capacity for self-disclosure: itconstitutes a “regulatory attack” forcing nature tosurrender its latent power. Heidegger’s exampleof such “challenging revealing” is atomic power:in comparison to wind power—which harnessesthe power of the wind, but only when it blows—atomic power forcibly extracts the atom’s latentpower. In so doing it maximizes nature’s yield, al-beit at the cost of transforming nature itself fromthe highest form of “bringing forth” to a merequantum of resource. Heidegger’s term is Bestand(standing reserve), indicating something made tostand by, on call for use or further transformation.His example is the hydroelectric plant that trans-forms the nature of a river into an energy sourcethat henceforth derives its Being, determining theways in which it is able to show up for us, fromthe power plant it now serves.8 Treating nature asa resource in this way refuses to allow nature’s“self-refusal,” its recalcitrant materiality, to showup as self-refusal. Heidegger’s way of expressingthis is fittingly opaque: technology is, in its essence,a mode of unconcealing that covers over its ownconcealing of all other possible modes of uncon-cealing. It refuses to allow anything to show up asconcealed, as unintelligible, as resistant to humanends. In the terms of “The Origin of the Work ofArt,” Technik—unlike techne—refuses “to let theearth be an earth.”9

It is crucial to grasp that, on Heidegger’s ac-count of technology, man is not in any straightfor-ward sense the agent of such disclosure, thoughhe retains a privileged relation to it as that be-ing within whose nature it resides to disclose aworld.10 Even so, like everything else that showsup for man, man appears to himself in a certain


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light, depending on what “destining of Be-ing” holds sway: technological man, qua utility-maximizer, understands his relation to everythingthat exists in ways that are incommensurable tothose in which medieval man understands his re-lation to everything that exists, qua ens creatum.This is why Heidegger holds that human beingsare themselves challenged by technology, ratherthan simply wielding it. What distinguishes thetechnological understanding of Being is that manappears to himself primarily as a resource for thefirst time: that is, man finds himself installed withinan all-encompassing framework (Gestell) that hedoes not control, and in which human beings showup, like beings in general, first and foremost asresource.11 What alarms Heidegger about sucha relation to beings, what he calls the “supremedanger,” is that it will become so pervasive as toeclipse all other possible modes of disclosure, in-cluding all forms of poiesis. Should technology be-come absolute in this sense, it would threaten tocover over all trace of itself as a destining of Be-ing, that is, one possible way of relating to beingsin general, such that man henceforth would takethe way in which entities show up under its swayfor the final truth about beings, including himself.At that point man would risk becoming nothingbut a resource in his own eyes, all other ways ofunderstanding and interacting with beings beingforeclosed.

It is because Heidegger understands art as arival mode of disclosure, capable of confrontingtechnology on the ground of what they have incommon, that it holds such significance for him.Against the “supreme danger” presaged by thefinal triumph of a technological understanding ofBeing, art holds out a “saving power”: the promiseof a different, nondomineering relation to beings.As with technology, however, so too with art as amode of disclosure: man is not in any straightfor-ward sense its agent, even if the artist is, like thecraftsman, “co-responsible” for what he “bringsforth.” Indeed, in the very first paragraph of “TheOrigin of the Work of Art,” Heidegger rules outappeal to the artist as an explanation of how worksof art come into being:

On the usual view, the work arises out of and by meansof the activity of the artist. But by what and whence isthe artist what he is? By the work; for to say that thework does credit to the master means that it is the workthat first lets the artist emerge as master of his art. The

artist is the origin of the work. The work is the originof the artist. Neither is without the other. Nevertheless,neither is the sole support of the other. In themselvesand in their interrelations artist and work are each ofthem by virtue of a third thing which is prior to both,namely that which also gives artist and work of art theirnames—art.12

Given that Heidegger rejects a modern view of artat the outset, he cannot go on to infer the natureof art from its commonly accepted instances with-out presupposing the very conception he wants tocontest. The problem he faces is thus a classicallyhermeneutic one of how to begin: his solution is toappeal instead to what he calls the “work being ofthe work” (Werksein des Werkes). On Heidegger’saccount, the “work being” of the work resides inthe “strife” (Streit) it initiates between its “world,”or what I shall gloss as the background horizon ofintelligibility that it sets up (aufstellend), and its“earth,” or what I shall gloss as whatever resists il-lumination from within that horizon of intelligibil-ity, but is set forth (herstellend) as unilluminatedwithin it. Accordingly, what makes something awork of art is that it enables whatever it illumi-nates to show up in the light of some underlyingconception of Being, while disclosing that not ev-erything can be understood in terms of that con-ception, by setting it forward as unmastered (andhence obscure) within it. That art retains this ca-pacity “to let the earth be an earth” is ultimatelywhat distinguishes techne from Technik.13

Truly epochal or ground-laying works of artmake manifest the implicit understanding of Be-ing of a particular historical culture and, in so do-ing, reflect it back to that culture as its understand-ing of Being for the first time. Heidegger’s accountof the Greek temple does this; by gathering andfocusing those practices that are decisive for itsculture, it articulates that culture’s implicit self-understanding. In Heidegger’s words: “The tem-ple . . . first gives to things their look and to mentheir outlook on themselves.”14

Given Heidegger’s opening move, such disclo-sure cannot be a product of artistic agency in anystraightforward sense; artists are not granted anyprivileged insight into the nature of their age.Rather, it is a product of “truth setting itself towork” in and through the work of art. This is anaspect of Heidegger’s thought that I cannot hopeto do justice to here. But in brief, the concep-tion of truth Heidegger has in mind is not that of


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correspondence between a proposition and a stateof affairs in the world (and hence not one thatcould reduce works of art to utterances withpropositional contents that correctly or incor-rectly represent how things stand in the world)but what Heidegger takes to be the more primor-dial sense of truth as aletheia. So understood, truthdraws attention to the “unconcealment” presup-posed before any proposition can pick out, or failto pick out, some state of affairs in the world. En-tities must already be disclosed—and not neutrally,but in the light of some unthematized understand-ing of Being—before statements can correspond orfail to correspond to how things are.

I do not intend this thumbnail sketch to sat-isfy Heideggerians, much less to persuade non-Heideggerians, but to show how marginally, bymodern standards, the artist figures in Heideg-ger’s understanding of both how works of art comeabout and what they disclose. That said, Heideggeracknowledges that the “work-being” of the workcannot be grasped in isolation from the fact of itshaving been created. But he is at pains to distin-guish being created, which is to be understood interms of the “work-being” of the work (and not,say, the artist’s intentions), from being made. Sounderstood, “createdness” is not the work’s gen-erative ground, but a product of truth setting itselfto work: it “fixes” truth (the strife between worldand earth, intelligibility and opacity) in place assome particular configuration, that is, as a partic-ular work of art.

iii. walton on transparency andmind-independence

Clearly, a good deal more would be required tojustify Heidegger’s claims, but it is not my goalto provide a justification here. Instead I want touse Heidegger’s claims regarding art and tech-nology to motivate a question that could notarise from within Heidegger studies itself: couldphotography, as understood by analytic philoso-phers of art, hold out the prospect for a “decisiveconfrontation” with technology of the kind thatHeidegger sought from authentic art? This wouldimply that analytic philosophy of photographypartakes of something like the antisubjectivismof Heidegger’s philosophy of art more generally.This is the counterintuitive proposition I now wantto explore.

For this purpose I will rely on Walton’s ac-count of photographic depiction in “TransparentPictures” (1984), despite the fact that several as-pects of his article have proved highly controver-sial.15 This is because, for all the controversy thatWalton’s claim that photographs are “transpar-ent” has generated, the more foundational claim(concerning the mind-independent nature of thephotographic process) with which he underwritesit has been widely accepted, at least by other an-alytic philosophers of photography. According toWalton, it is a necessary condition of seeing thatone’s perceptual experience depend causally andcounterfactually on what is seen: we “see through”photographs because had, contrary to fact, whatwas before the camera at the moment of exposurebeen different, what one sees in the resulting pho-tograph would have differed accordingly. Given,however, that analogous claims can be made aboutmany realist paintings, Walton needs to rule outsuch cases. To wit: only photographs are naturallycounterfactually dependent on what they depict;had, contrary to fact, what was before the cam-era at the moment of exposure been different,its photograph would have differed accordingly,irrespective of whether the photographer had no-ticed the difference and intended to record it. Apainting, by contrast, would only have differed ifthe painter noticed the difference and intendedto depict it. This is because painting is, and pho-tography is not, dependent on the mental statesof the artist. Setting aside the further claim that,other conditions being met, this warrants claimingthat we “see through” photographs, the underly-ing mind-independence thesis is widely accepted.

The question I want to pose is this: is the mind-independence thesis as plausible as it is generallytaken to be and, if not, what makes it seem soplausible nonetheless? According to the mind-independence thesis, the way in which our visualexperience of flower paintings, say, is dependenton the flowers depicted is different in kind fromthe way in which our visual experience of flowerphotographs is dependent on the flowers pho-tographed. Only the latter is naturally counterfac-tually dependent upon what it is of. In effect, theflower paintings are a form of visual testimony andare correspondingly defeasible: they tell us whatthe painter believed was there. This is not to saythat the painter cannot be correct in his beliefs,of course, but rather, the argument runs, that thephotographer need not be. Whatever controversy


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Walton’s claim that photographs are transparentmay have elicited, this claim is generally taken tobe persuasive. By contrast, Heidegger’s claim thatthe artist is not the “origin” of the work of artwould, I take it, generally be thought counterin-tuitive, at least by non-Heideggerians. But is thisdifference in intuitions well founded?

It is notable that the mind-independence thesisstrikes philosophers as much more intuitive than itdoes photographers, photo-theorists, and critics. Isthis because the latter do not appreciate the philo-sophical point at issue, or because philosophersare insufficiently informed about how photogra-phy works, or both? Here I think it is worth insist-ing on the importance of something that shouldbe better marked: namely, that what one takesas one’s paradigm case of photography will haveenormous, if often unwitting, repercussions for thephilosophical theory one goes on to elaborate onits basis. Walton acknowledges that the paradigmcase for his own account is the snapshot ratherthan the work of art; I believe that a more appo-site paradigm case for his account would in factbe some kind of automatic recording mechanism.Think of time-lapse nature photography or speedcameras, of which it is literally true that the mech-anism fires off automatically, irrespective of whatanyone believes to be in front of the camera atthe moment of exposure. Were one to begin fromthe kind of authorial control exercised by photo-graphic artists, one would expect the account thatemerges to be correspondingly different.

But am I simply begging the question by insist-ing on artistic agency in this context? The fact thatphotographers have it in their gift to set all mannerof variables, as critics of mechanical conceptionsof photography maintain, is typically taken to fallfoul of Walton’s point in just this way. To takeonly the pre-digital case: photographers, such crit-ics maintain, make innumerable decisions aboutcamera hardware and camera settings, film andpaper stock, darkroom variables and techniques,and the like.16 All this may be granted, the defaultphilosophical response runs, and it still hold thatfrom the moment of exposure to resulting print, atleast in a fully automated process, the informationchannel from input to output is impermeable tothe photographer’s mental states.17 Granted, such“encapsulation” can be weakened in various wayswhen the full range of darkroom techniques is em-ployed, but, at least in theory, what was in frontof the lens at the moment of exposure, as opposed

to what the photographer believed was in front onthe lens at the moment of exposure, should be re-trievable from the resulting photograph, assumingone knows enough about how the variables rele-vant to processing the latent image were set. I amskeptical, but before I say why, I want to considerthe relation between Walton’s conception of pho-tography and Heidegger’s conception of art moreclosely.

iv. the art in photography

Recall Heidegger’s distinction between bringingforth and challenging forth. The former, Heideg-ger claims, isthe hallmark of authentic art, that is,art that does not seek to impose the subjectivewill of the artist on the material from which itis made, but works in concert with nature’s owncapacity of self-disclosure. In such art techne re-mains handmaiden to phusis: it is nature’s self-emergence that comes to fruition in, and is com-pleted by, the artist’s work. There are notableparallels with the most basic theme in theoreti-cal reflection on photography here. But to grasptheir significance it is necessary to realize thatWalton’s mind-independence thesis is only themost recent manifestation of a broader traditionof thought that can be traced all the way backto the way in which photography was presentedby its original inventors and pioneers, notablyJoseph Nicephore Niepce, Louis-Jacques-MandeDaguerre, and Henry Fox Talbot. Niepce, creditedwith fixing the photographic image for the firsttime in 1826, called his process heliography (or“sun writing”) and described it as “spontaneousreproduction by the action of light.” Daguerrecharacterized his own process as “not an instru-ment that serves to draw nature, but a chemicaland physical process which gives her the power toreproduce herself.” When the two joined forces,they contracted to “fix the images which natureoffers, without the assistance of a draughtsman.”Fox Talbot meanwhile described his rival calotypeprocess, forerunner to modern negative–positiveprocesses, as a “photogenic drawing” that depicts“by optical and chemical means alone” an image“impressed by nature’s hand.”18

What all these formulations share is the con-ceit that photography is at root a natural processthrough which nature “reproduces herself” (orrather her appearance) by means of light alone.


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Figure 1. Lee Friedlander, Stems (1999). c© Lee Friedlander, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, USA.

So construed, photography—literally, writing withlight—though dependent on the natural processesof optics and chemistry, remains free of humanmediation in the respect that counts: the gen-eration of the image itself. This constellation ofideas, departing from various metaphors concern-ing the “agency of light,” has permeated theo-retical reflection on photography ever since; themind-independence thesis is just one of its moreformally refined recent variations.19 What the un-derlying notion has in common with Heidegger’stheory of art is twofold, pertaining both to howworks of art and photographs come into beingand what they show as a result of how they comeinto being.

On both fronts, both accounts diminish the sig-nificance of their object’s ostensible creator. Likeauthentic art on Heidegger’s account, photogra-phy is here conceived as an assisted self-disclosureof nature: “not an instrument that serves to drawnature,” as Daguerre puts it, “but a chemical andphysical process which gives her the power to re-produce herself.”20 As a corollary of this stress

on self-generation, both accounts are required todownplay their object’s prima facie creator withrespect to what appears. On neither account canwhat the work or photograph shows be reducedto a function of its creator’s will. On Heidegger’saccount authentic works of art are those that facil-itate the appearing of what is already coming intoappearance, rather than those that express an in-dividual artist’s vision. On Walton’s account whatappears in any photograph can only be what wasin front of the lens at the moment of exposure,irrespective of what the photographer believed tobe there or intended to depict.

How what appears appears, by contrast, is aresult of the way in which a given artist or pho-tographer harnesses, to put it in Heideggerianterms, nature’s interplay of self-disclosure andself-concealment. Even Walton, whose accountis designed to hold for photography in general,is willing to grant talk of (some) photographsshowing us the world “through the photogra-pher’s eyes.”21 But if Walton is right about the un-derlying mind-independence of the photographic


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Figure 2. Edouard Manet, Moss Roses in a Vase (1882). Oil on canvas, 22 × 13 5/8 in. Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute,Williamstown, Massachusetts, USA. Image c© Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute (photo by Michael Agee).

process, this ability of some photographs to showus the world from a particular point of viewnotwithstanding, there will be an important dif-ference of scope to their respective accounts andhence of any affinities between them. Where Hei-degger’s conception of techne as handmaiden tophusis pertains exclusively to great art, Walton’sconception of mind-independence pertains to the

products of the photographic process in general.But is Walton right?

I have already suggested that Walton’s account(and as a consequence much subsequent theoriz-ing in the philosophy of photography) implicitlytakes the snapshot or some more or less auto-matic recording mechanism as its paradigm caseand that one would expect standard philosophical


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accounts to come out differently were this not so.So how do such theories fare in the face of seriousphotographic art?

I shall take Lee Friedlander’s series of lateflower photographs, made between 1994 and 1999,as a test case. What they show, the standard argu-ment runs, can only be what was there to be seen.But what about how they show it? Here one findsa narrow set of parameters consistently mined fortheir aesthetic potential. The works are all blackand white, of a domestic scale, photographed on35 mm or square medium format film, often closeup. Each image depicts the stems of cut flowersstood in clear glass vases of various shapes filledwith water. There is little background detail, andthe subject is framed in such a way that eitherthe top or the bottom of the vase, and sometimesboth, is cropped out. In none are all the headsof the flowers visible, though occasionally one ortwo tulip heads curve back into the shot. At firstglance the subject appears to be the stems them-selves, but on closer inspection it is as much ifnot more the effects that glass and water have onrefracting and focusing light as the stems them-selves that are foregrounded. It may even be thatphotography itself is being playfully allegorizedhere.

This is not some (bare) recording of flowers inwater, then, but a making present, through themedium of photography, of a persistently minedand limited set of features. Some of these, suchas the play of light and shadow, or the tiny oxy-gen bubbles that cling to the stems in several ofthe images, would not even be visible to every-day human attention, or at least not salient, ab-sent the photographs that make them present. Thephotographs clearly depend on what was there,but how what was there becomes salient equallyclearly depends on the photographer’s exploita-tion of precision optics and the capacities of var-ious films, papers, filters, and developing agentsto enhance tonal contrasts and the like. In Hei-deggerian terms, the finished prints “allow whatis coming into appearance to appear”; they makeit salient, make it show up as worthy of atten-tion for the first time. Contra Heidegger, how-ever, they do so in a highly individual manner.One need only compare Friedlander’s Stems tothe taxonomic and naturalist ambition of KarlBlossfeldt’s plant and flower photographs orthe erotic, fetishistic quality of Robert Map-plethorpe’s images of orchids and cally lillies to

be struck by the fact that this is anything but animpersonal disclosure of being.

So what? Walton goes out of his way to ac-knowledge that some photographs show us theworld from a particular point of view, without thisdenting the fact that they show us the world itselffrom that point of view and not merely its depic-tion. Suppose, then, that Walton were to grant allthis, while insisting on the distinction between nat-ural and intentional counterfactual dependencenonetheless.

Take Edouard Manet’s series of late flowerpaintings, made between 1881 and 1883, as a com-parison class. Are there differences of kind ofthe sort that Walton’s account requires? Con-sider the counterfactuals. Suppose that, contraryto fact, Manet breaks for lunch while paintingRoses Mousseuses dans un Vase and unknownto him several small but visible petals towardsthe rear of his still life fall off. Further supposethat Manet’s housekeeper, distressed by her em-ployer’s rapid decline, disposes of them before heresumes. Should Manet fail to attend to that as-pect of the scene again, this change will pass un-marked in the finished painting. Walton’s accountgoes through: what we see in the finished paintingis intentionally dependent on the mental states ofthe artist; whatever the painter fails to notice—ornotices, but decides not to depict—does not makethe finished work. Are there the right kind of dif-ferences between this case and Friedlander?

Again, consider the counterfactuals. Supposethat, contrary to fact, having set up this still life(Figure 3), placed the camera on a tripod, andopened up the diaphragm of his lens to its maxi-mum in order to reduce depth of field to a mini-mum, Friedlander leaves the room to take a call.Returning to his camera, and careful not to jolt thetripod, Friedlander takes one last look through theviewfinder and, finding everything to his satisfac-tion, trips the shutter, having failed to notice thatan in-shot, non-occluded, but out of focus stemtoward the rear of his still life has been removedby an irresponsible house guest with a weaknessfor romantic gestures. Does Walton’s account gothrough? Contrary to philosophical expectations,the answer is “no.” Unless the photographer no-tices the difference and intends to record it, byadjusting his camera settings accordingly, it willnot show up in the final image. What one sees inthe final image will be the same—half a dozen orso stems pressed up against the near side of the


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Figure 3. Lee Friedlander Stems (1999). c© Lee Friedlander, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, USA.

vase in sharp relief against a murky, out of focusbackground—irrespective of whether that particu-lar stem is present or not. In technical terms, thisis a product of how camera optics (specifically,the inverse relation between aperture and depthof field) function, but in this context it is morepertinently a product of Friedlander’s intentions,as embodied by the way he deploys such cameracapabilities in the service of his creative ends.

These photographs, in other words, are rel-evantly mind-dependent: they are governed byFriedlander’s use of his medium to realize hisintentions. Because the missing stem made nodifference to Friedlander achieving the result hewanted, it did not figure in the decisions deter-mining the final image. As a result, Friedlander’scamera, functioning normally and free from out-side interference, fails to record a perceptible dif-ference in the world—the removal of an in-shot,non-occluded stem—that it needs to record forthe standard counterfactual story to go through.Friedlander’s results fail to track this perceptiblechange because the photographer failed to notice

it, and he failed to notice it because it made no dif-ference to realizing his intentions. So what appearsin the photograph generated from the perceptualmanifold recorded by Friedlander’s camera, andnot just how what appears appears, turns out to beintentionally dependent on the mental states (be-liefs, intentions, and so on) of its maker after all,and the same is no doubt true of many other pho-tographic works of art.22 Where is the differencein kind to Manet?

What Walton and, I shall argue, Heideggerboth miss, albeit for quite different reasons, isthe artist’s presence in her work. They miss thedepth of decision that pervades every aspect ofa convincing work of art, photographic or other-wise. Walton’s account may work for snapshots,but it does not adequately capture large swathesof photography beyond this. Like analytic the-ories of photography more generally, Walton’saccount remains too close to folk psychologicalconceptions of the medium, themselves premisedon “point and shoot” technology. Perhaps as a re-sult, his account is insufficiently sensitive to the


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ways in which photographs can be relevantly de-pendent on the mental states of the photographerin such a way as to undermine any hard and fastdifference between photographs and other formsof depictive art.23

v. mind-dependence and artistic character

But what of Heidegger’s account? Setting to oneside the example of the Greek temple, is it a plau-sible account of individually authored works ofart?24 Heidegger’s account of Vincent van Gogh’spainting of a pair of peasant shoes is the obvioustest case here. Van Gogh’s painting is the pre-text for a rather florid paean to the world andearth of the female peasant that Heidegger claimsthe painting discloses. The account is well known,and I do not intend to go over it here.25 Instead Iwant to focus on the debate with the art historianMeyer Schapiro that it occasioned.26 Schapiro hastwo broad objections to Heidegger’s interpreta-tion. The first, which he secures through empiricalresearch, is that Heidegger is wrong at the levelof the work’s iconography: these are van Gogh’s(not a female peasant’s) shoes and van Gogh was atown dweller at the time these works were painted.Schapiro is much more likely to be right aboutthis than Heidegger. But right or wrong, it is be-side the point: Heidegger is only concerned withwhat the shoes as painted disclose of the peasantworld, not with what is represented by the paint-ing, and nothing in principle precludes disclosingx by representing y.27

Schapiro’s second criticism is connected in hisown mind to the first. It is that, as a result of gettingthe painting’s iconography wrong, Heidegger failsto recognize “the artist’s presence in the work.”28

In effect, the shoes are a kind of self-portrait:it is van Gogh who looks back at us from theseshoes’ worn physiognomy. I believe that Schapirois essentially right about this, if not for quite thereasons that he gives. The painting is not a self-portrait because these are van Gogh’s shoes, butbecause this is van Gogh’s painting. It is a self-portrait in this sense simply by virtue of its beinga painting by van Gogh. If this is right, Schapiro’ssecond criticism stands independently of the irrel-evance of his first.

Philosophers sympathetic to Heidegger rou-tinely fail to grasp the depth of this point as apoint about painting. Van Gogh’s oeuvre, like

that of any other artist, is marked by a distinc-tive artistic vision: it embodies a particular setof convictions and conceptions of salience andvalue in the world. This is sometimes called “artis-tic style,” though “artistic character” would comecloser to what I have in mind, unless, that is, artis-tic style is understood as something that only fullymanifests itself across an artist’s oeuvre (or somesignificant stretch thereof) in ways analogous tothose in which character only manifests itselfacross an individual’s commitments taken overthe long haul, rather than the intentions animatingparticular acts.29 Artistic character, so construed,is what artists cannot not express; it permeatestheir oeuvre in ways analogous to those in whichcharacter in the everyday sense manifests itselfover the course of a life lived. It would be hardto fully understand why we return to the worksof some artists repeatedly and those of others notat all if they did not exude something like artisticcharacter in this sense. What we are responding toin doing so is that particular conception of salienceand value, call it a world, that an individual artist’swork, and only her work, in all its peculiaritiesaffords.

This is what sets individually authored modernworks of art apart from both collectively producedworks (such as the Greek temple) and individuallyproduced images not made under modern condi-tions for autonomous art (medieval crucifixionsor Orthodox icons, for example). But it is some-thing that Heidegger’s middle period view of artas an impersonal form of ontological disclosureindexed to a particular historical culture, takentogether with his antipathy for the subjectivism ofaesthetics, leaves no room to acknowledge, despitethe fact that he is arguably trading on it himselfwhen he appropriates van Gogh’s romantic peas-ant pathos for his own ends. If this is right, Hei-degger, not unlike Walton, if for rather differentreasons, does not so much miss the artist’s pres-ence in his work as disavow his own reliance onit.

But what is the broader upshot of this? I saidat the outset that my project was to take photog-raphy as theorized by analytic philosophers as atest case for Heidegger’s claims about the relationbetween art and technology. On the account thathas emerged, art stages a “decisive confrontationwith technology” not solely by virtue of remainingresponsive to nature’s interplay of self-disclosureand self-concealment, but also, contra Heidegger,


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insofar as it preserves a space for what I havecalled “artistic character.” Preserving such a spaceis how art internally resists the reduction of humanbeing to a faceless, interchangeable, quantum ofresource: we value the work of particular artists,analogously to the ways in which we value otherpersons, in large part for what cannot be foundelsewhere.

This is no less true of photography than it isof any other work of art, which is why Heideggerand Walton’s respective ways of formulating whatI have called “the question concerning photogra-phy” are mutually implicating. From a Heidegge-rian perspective, the question would be how artcould resist technology when the art is photog-raphy. From Walton’s perspective, the question iswhether the nature of the photographic processsuffices to distinguish photographic pictures fromall others. My response to Heidegger has beenthat works of art, photography included, resist atechnological understanding of the Being of be-ings in part for reasons that Heidegger gives andin part by preserving a space for artistic characterthat his middle period view of art as impersonalform of ontological disclosure leaves insufficientroom to acknowledge. My response to Walton hasbeen that, to the extent that photographs succeedin preserving such a space, to the extent, that is,that they are marked by the depth of decisionthat is its corollary and in so doing qualify as art,they cannot be robustly mind-independent in thesense that Walton’s account requires. These tworesponses are mutually implicating: photographicart resists technology to the extent that it is mind-dependent.30

DIARMUID COSTELLO

Department of PhilosophyUniversity of WarwickCoventry CV4 7AL, United Kingdom

internet: [email protected]

1. The locus classicus is Kendall L. Walton, “TransparentPictures: On the Nature of Photographic Realism,” CriticalInquiry 11 (1984): 246–276. But see also: Walton, “‘LookingAgain through Photographs: A Response to Edwin Martin”’Critical Inquiry 12:4 (1986): 801–808; Walton, “‘On Picturesand Photographs: Objections Answered’” in Film Theoryand Philosophy, eds. Richard Allen and Murray Smith (Ox-ford: Clarendon, 1997), pp. 60–75; and Walton, “Postscripts

to ‘Transparent Pictures:’ Clarifications and To Do’s” in Wal-ton, Marvelous Images: On Values and the Arts (Oxford:OUP, 2008), pp. 117–132.

2. Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,”Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (NewYork: Harper and Row, 1971), pp. 17–87.

3. See also Dana S. Belu and Andrew Feenberg, “Hei-degger’s Aporetic Ontology of Technology,” Inquiry 53(2010): 1–19. On Belu and Feenberg’s account, if Heideg-ger’s claims about the totalizing nature of “Enframing” arecorrect, he could not occupy the position he needs to occupyin order to make them; conversely, if he is in a position tomake them, his claims cannot be correct.

4. See Nigel Warburton, “Seeing Through ‘SeeingThrough Photographs’” Ratio 1 (1988): 62–74; Gregory Cur-rie, “Photography, Painting and Perception,” The Journal ofAesthetics and Art Criticism 49 (1991): 23–29; and Noel Car-roll, Theorizing the Moving Image (Oxford University Press,1996), among others..

5. Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Tech-nology,” The Question Concerning Technology and OtherEssays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper and Row,1977), p. 35.

6. See Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technol-ogy,” pp. 10–11, and Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche (NewYork: Harper Collins, 1979), vol. 1, pp. 80–83. On the relationbetween techne and phusis see Bruce Foltz, Inhabiting theEarth: Heidegger, Environmental Ethics and the Metaphysicsof Nature (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 1995), chap. 1,and Julian Young, Heidegger’s Later Philosophy (CambridgeUniversity Press, 2002), chap. 3.

7. Compare Heidegger’s description of the cabinet-maker in Martin Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking? (NewYork: Harper and Row, 1968), pp. 14–15.

8. All these examples are taken from Heidegger, “TheQuestion Concerning Technology.”

9. Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” Poetry,Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York:Harper and Row, 1971), p. 46.

10. In fact this relation is more complex than I can dojustice to here. See, in this regard, Heidegger’s critique of in-strumental conceptions of technology in his “The QuestionConcerning Technology,” pp. 5–11. Against such concep-tions, Heidegger appeals to Aristotle’s conception of four-fold causality for a richer, noninstrumental conception ofcausality in terms of mutually implicating modes of beingresponsible, as in the silversmith’s “co-responsibility” forthe chalice he brings forth.

11. On Gestell, see Miguel de Beistegui, The New Hei-degger (London: Continuum, 2005), chaps. 4 and 5, and Ju-lian Young, “The Essence of Technology,” in Heidegger’sLater Philosophy.

12. Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” p. 17.13. There are at least three senses of “earth” at play in

the essay that Heidegger does not clearly distinguish: earthas native soil (with reference to the world of the peasantdisclosed by van Gogh’s painting); earth as the materialityof material (with reference to the “stoniness of stone” asforegrounded in the Greek temple); and earth as what isrendered opaque by a given mode of disclosure (with refer-ence to the epochal history of Being).

14. Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” p. 43.See Hubert Dreyfus, “Heidegger’s Ontology of Art” on


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works of art as “manifesting,” “articulating,” or “reconfig-uring” what is decisive for a historical culture, in A Compan-ion to Heidegger, eds. Dreyfus and Mark Wrathall (Oxford:Blackwell, 2005), pp. 407–419.

15. Kendall L. Walton, “Transparent Pictures: On theNature of Photographic Realism,” Critical Inquiry 11 (1984):246–276. For an overview of these controversies see: Diar-muid Costello and Dawn M. Phillips, “Automatism, Causal-ity and Realism: Foundational Problems in the Philosophyof Photography,” Philosophy Compass 4 (2009): 1–21.

16. See, for example, Neil Walsh Allen and Joel Sny-der, “Photography, Vision and Representation,” Critical In-quiry 2 (1975): 143–169, and Joel Snyder, “Picturing Vision,”Critical Inquiry 6 (1980): 499–526. For an exception, see Do-minic McIver Lopes, “Jetz Sind Wir Alle Kunstler,” in Kunst:Philosophie, ed. Julian Nida-Rumelin and Jacob Steinbren-ner (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2012), pp. 103–121.

17. This case is typically made by appeal to Fred Dretske,Knowledge and the Flow of Information (MIT Press, 1981).See Jonathan Cohen and Aaron Meskin, “On the EpistemicValue of Photographs,” The Journal of Aesthetics and ArtCriticism 62 (2004): 197–210, at pp. 200 ff., and Scott Walden,“Objectivity in Photography,” The British Journal of Aes-thetics 45 (2005): 258–272, at pp. 263 ff.

18. All these citations from Niepce, Daguerre, and Tal-bot are taken from Mary Warner Marien, Photography: ACultural History (London: Lawrence King, 2002), p. 23.

19. The view persists in the most nuanced recent ac-counts of photography as a multistage process originatingin a light exposure. See Dawn M. Phillips, “Photographyand Causation: Responding to Scruton’s Skepticism,” TheBritish Journal of Aesthetics 49 (2004): 327–340. Such ac-counts can be used to define photography independentlyof claims about mind-independence. See Lopes, “Nun SindWir Alle Kunstler.”

20. Mary Warner Marien, Photography: A Cultural His-tory (London: Lawrence King, 2002), p. 23.

21. Walton, “Transparent Pictures: On the Nature ofPhotographic Realism,” pp. 261–262.

22. This is not an anomalous case. Imagine taking a longexposure of a yacht marina on a dead calm night using a slowfilm and the camera’s smallest aperture for maximum detail.Half a dozen boats come and go, but none of this makes the

final print, a richly detailed image of a marina populatedby only those boats that remained at mooring throughout.Similarly, imagine images of dance performances that showno dancers or marching armies that show no soldiers. Thenumber of qualifications and caveats to the standard accountrequired to rule out such cases only serves to undermine thehard and fast distinction between painting and photographythat it was supposed to capture.

23. Tracings, rubbings, and other more or less automatictranscription processes provide interesting test cases for thisclaim from the opposite direction.

24. Heidegger’s account of the Greek temple is muchmore plausible for his purposes, arguably because it cannotbe understood as a work of art in the modern sense of thatterm. See Diarmuid Costello, “Das Kunstwerk im Zeital-ter seiner technischen Ausstellbarkeit,” in Die Ausstellung:Politik Eines Rituals, eds. Dorothea von Hantelmann andCarolin Meister (Berlin: Diaphanes, 2010), pp. 161–189.

25. Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,”pp. 33–34.

26. Meyer Schapiro, “The Still Life as Personal Object—A Note on Heidegger and van Gogh,” and “Further Noteson Heidegger and van Gogh,” both in Theory and Philos-ophy of Art: Style, Artist and Society (New York: GeorgeBrazillier, 1994), pp. 135–142, 143–151.

27. On this point, and the debate between Heideggerand Schapiro more generally, see Jacques Derrida, “Restitu-tions” in The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington andIan McLeod (Chicago University Press, 1987), pp. 255–382.

28. Meyer Schapiro, “The Still Life as Personal Object—A Note on Heidegger and van Gogh,” in Theory and Phi-losophy of Art: Style, Artist and Society (New York: GeorgeBrazillier, 1994), p. 139.

29. For a “deep” conception of artistic style, see MauriceMerleau-Ponty, “Cezanne’s Doubt,” in The Merleau-PontyAesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting, ed. Galen John-son (Northwestern University Press, 1993), p. 67. For a moreanalytic take on these issues see Jenefer Robinson, “Styleand Personality in the Literary Work,” Philosophical Review94 (1985): 227–247.

30. I would like to thank Miguel de Beistegui, EileenJohn, Wayne Martin, Dawn Phillips, and especially DomLopes for their feedback on this article in draft.

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The Question Concerning Photography - warwick.ac.uk · Heidegger’s claims about great art occasioning a “strife between world and earth” are likely to ap-pearuninformativeatbestandgrandioseatworst