The particularity of photographic experience (original) (raw)

Pictorial Experience: Not So Special After All

Philosophical Studies, 2014

The central thesis (CT) that this paper upholds is that a picture depicts an object by generating in those who view the picture a visual experience of that object. I begin by presenting a brief sketch of intentionalism, the theory of perception in terms of which I propose to account for pictorial experience. I then discuss Richard Wollheim’s twofoldness thesis and explain why it should be rejected. Next, I show that the socalled unique phenomenology of pictorial experience is simply an instance of perceptual indeterminacy. Lastly, I discuss a phenomenon associated with pictures that could be considered a problem for CT, and account for it by invoking the thesis that visual experience is cognitively penetrable.

Data vs. Matter: What Photography Can Teach us about Mental Images

The debate over the existence and nature of mental images is ages old. Through its history this debate turned quite technical and complex, but here I wish to strip it from its technical form, go back to its roots and try to shed new light on the matter with the aid of photography. Both sides of the debate on whether mental images exist can be grasped quite intuitively. The argument for the existence of mental images surely draws much of its power from intuition – we all experience mental images, we can imagine visual objects at will, have visual recollections and so on. But the case against mental images also draws from intuition – we can sense that mental images are different from other images, are “less clear”, “less stable”, elusive perhaps. This feeling is strengthened when one’s mental images are put under interrogation. If we are asked to imagine a dog, for instance, and do so, we may still find it difficult to answer questions about the looks of the dog, let alone the background against which it appears in the supposed “image”. I will suggest in this paper that mental images do not exist, or at the very least that our appeals to them are flawed and illusory, but in joining this side of the debate over the existence of mental images I will draw relatively little from the current discussions of the matter in philosophy, psychology, cognitive science and neuroscience, and will instead make a broader appeal to photography, esp. to artistic practices that investigate vision and representation through photography. The discussion will follow these lines: I open by making some further comments on the appeals of mental images (section 1). This is important because we need to always keep in mind that abolishing mental images from our vocabulary comes at a high price. In section 2 I discuss some general features of photographs. I will use photographs to draw more attention to the difference between how photographs are experienced and how mental images are supposed to be experienced. More specifically I will suggest that mental images cannot be replaced with photographs, although we intuit them as such. In section 3 I contrast the view of photography as representation (section 3.1) and as ‘data’ (section 3.2) with the view that photography is an indexical physical sign that requires physical stratum to be actualized. I suggest we reject the view of photography as a ‘nonmaterial, representational image’, and following, suggest that the notion of ‘image’ (in ‘mental image’) is itself incoherent.

Picture, Image and Experience

The Philosophical Review, 2001

How do pictures represent? In this book Robert Hopkins casts new light on an ancient question by connecting it to issues in the philosophies of mind and perception. He starts by describing several striking features of picturing that demand explanation. These features strongly suggest that our experience of pictures is central to the way they represent, and Hopkins characterizes that experience as one of resemblance in a particular respect. He deals convincingly with the objections traditionally assumed to be fatal to resemblance views, and shows how his own account is uniquely well placed to explain picturing's key features. His discussion engages in detail with issues concerning perception in general, including how to describe phenomena that have long puzzled philosophers and psychologists, and the book concludes with an attempt to see what a proper understanding of picturing can tell us about that deeply mysterious phenomenon, the visual imagination.

On the Apparent Incompatibility of Perceptual and Conventional Accounts of Pictures

Proceedings of the European Society for Aesthetics, 2022

What are pictures ? To answer this question, one of the most successful approaches is what has been called the perceptual account. On this approach, pictures are fundamentally characterized by the way they are perceived by subjects. This principle can for example be fleshed out by claiming that pictures foster a specific type of twofold perceptual experience in subjects. By contrast, another type of account, that I shall call conventional account, is somewhat neglected nowadays because it appears as insufficient to distinguish pictures from other kinds of representations. These two types of accounts are often presented as incompatible. However, it is not obvious in what sense they are so. The aim of this paper is thus twofold. Firstly, to precisely identify the differences between the perceptual and the conventional accounts of pictures. Secondly, to suggest that there might still be a role for the conventional account. To provide support for this view, I will show that the perceptual and conventional accounts may not have the same explananda, leaving open the possibility that a theory of depiction integrating both might be built.

Photographic Phenomenology as Cognitive Phenomenology

British Journal of Aesthetics, 2015

Photographic pictorial experience is thought to have a peculiar phenomenology to it, one that fails to accompany the pictorial experiences one has before so-called 'handmade' pictures. I present a theory that explains this in terms of a common factor shared by beliefs formed on the basis of photographic pictorial experience and beliefs formed on the basis of ordinary, face-to-face, perceptual experience: the having of a psychologically immediate, non-inferential etiology. This theory claims that photographic phenomenology has less to do with photographs themselves, or the pictorial experiences they elicit, and is a matter of our cognitive response to those experiences. I illustrate this theory's benefits: it is neutral on the nature of photography and our folk-conception of photography; it is consistent with photographic phenomenology's being contingent; and it accounts for our experiences of hyperrealistic handmade pictures. Extant theories of photographic phenomenology falter on one or more of these issues.

The Representation of the Visual World in Photography

2008

As a visual sign, a photographic image usually represents an object or a scene; this is the habitual way of seeing it. But it accomplishes that common semiotic task by representing various formal features of the object or scene: its color, shape, texture and spatial distribution of light. The curious fact is that photography does this in very different ways. With respect to color, a pigmented object produces a certain spectral distribution of light, and an ordinary photograph of that object causes approximately the same spectral distribution. The pigmented emulsions of the photographic paper act upon light in the same way as the pigmentation of the objects. In this sense, photography represents color by sharing physical properties with the objects. In truth, instead of representing color, it reproduces color. We have an indexical aspect of photography here (an index being a sign that is physically connected to the object that it represents). This is quite different from what occurs with the representation of the spatial distributions of light (transparency, translucency, mirror-like appearance, gloss, matt quality, etc.) by photography. A glass of water is a physically transparent object that generates the visual sensation of transparency, but a photograph of that glass, being an opaque object in itself (the substratum is an opaque piece of paper), also conveys the sensation of transparency. Summing up, photography represents the spatial distributions of light not by sharing physical features with the objects, but by means of a transformation that brings about a certain kind of similarity. In this sense, we could speak of iconicity (an icon being a sign that refers to its object by means of some kind of similarity with it). This paper will present a survey of these and other semiotic categories involved in photography when representing color and the perceived spatial distributions of light.

The representation of the visual world in photography (2008)

CGIV 2008, Proceedings of the 4th European Conference on Colour in Graphics, Imaging, and Vision, 2008

As a visual sign, a photographic image usually represents an object or a scene; this is the habitual way of seeing it. But it accomplishes that common semiotic task by representing various formal features of the object or scene: its color, shape, texture and spatial distribution of light. The curious fact is that photography does this in very different ways. With respect to color, a pigmented object produces a certain spectral distribution of light, and an ordinary photograph of that object causes approximately the same spectral distribution. The pigmented emulsions of the photographic paper act upon light in the same way as the pigmentation of the objects. In this sense, photography represents color by sharing physical properties with the objects. In truth, instead of representing color, it reproduces color. We have an indexical aspect of photography here (an index being a sign that is physically connected to the object that it represents). This is quite different from what occurs ...

Visual Experience and The Laws of Appearance

Erkenntnis, 2022

  1. coined the phrase "the Laws of Appearance" for some underappreciated features of perceptual experience. Pautz suggests that the modal status of the Laws presents a puzzle: it is problematic to regard them as necessary, and also problematic to regard them as contingent. This paper presents possible counterexamples to the laws, suggesting that they are contingent as originally stated (Sect. 1). But the laws are readily modified so as to express constitutive features of normal human visual experience, and thus understood they are metaphysically necessary (Sect. 2). Analogous pictorial laws govern representational painting, and these can be explained by appealing to the representational format of the medium (Sect. 3). This invites the question whether there might be format-based explanations of the Laws of Appearance. If so, can the contingency of the format facts be squared with the necessity of the Laws? The paper answers "Yes" to both questions (Sect. 4).