Comments

• 

  written on 08-May-2009

  Dan CT [http://dan.cavedon.taylor.googlepages.com] says:

  First of all, thanks for the shout-out on your blog!
  
  Second, I should make it clear (and perhaps more clear in the paper) that my aim isn’t to establish or argue that photographs are fictionally incompetent; I hope only to establish a conditional: that if photographs are not fictionally incompetent, then this is not because the argument from cinema shows the idea to be wrongheaded. So for all the paper says there may indeed be a whole range of reasons why the fictional incompetence claim is wrong, I only argue that the argument from cinema isn’t one of them.
  
  Now as you rightly infer, I do happen to think the fictional incompetence claim is correct, however, but I’ve only come to believe this very recently--after re-reading Scruton’s Photography and Representation--so I haven’t fully considered a whole lot of objections to it yet (only the argument from cinema really), so this is helpful--thanks.
  
  I take it that the general thrust of the objection is that there are digitally manipulated photographs that depict inexistents. That sounds right to me. So (as you’ve no doubt guessed) my attempted escape route will be to question whether digitally manipulated photographs count as photographs. Maybe we should recognise a class of images that aren’t strictly speaking photographs but are pictures made by photographic means, or have some photographic elements embedded in them. I think Maynard makes this kind of distinction between photographs and photographic pictures, and Friday, I believe, thinks digitally manipulated photographs are manugraphic rather than photographic. So I agree entirely that the photograph is “a fictional representation made by photographic means”, but I believe there’s a bit of wiggle room here as to whether that entails that what we have here is, strictly speaking, a photograph of a fictional entity. This is admittedly quite a boring and predictable response, but on the face of it, it seems plausible and pretty likely that as we carve up picture types there will be some mixed (media) cases; that is, cases that are not fully manugraphic and not fully photographic. Then the question is whether I can convince you that the above photograph is precisely one of these cases in a way that doesn’t beg all the relevant questions. One way I’d be tempted to go in trying to convince you that the above isn't really a photograph is by arguing that ordinary thought and talk about pictures recognises that photographs are fictionally incompetent. This is related to the argument in the paper involving Shakespeare; I think an exactly similar argument can be made for the half-shark, half-seagull photograph. So suppose it is reported in that papers that a photograph has been discovered of a half-shark, half-seagull being. I think people will believe the reporter has made a mistake or is trying to play a joke on or mislead the viewers when the image is revealed as the above digitally manipulated photograph, and I’d suggest that the reason why viewers will feel this way is that our folk-theory of photographs says there can only be photographs of actually existing particulars and that this therefore supplies grounds for denying it is really a photograph of a half-shark, half-seagull entity.
  
  What do you think? I guess one response to my argument might be to question why we should think that our folk-theory of pictures is in good order...

• 

  written on 09-May-2009

  patencia says:

  ** FOR SPECIAL CIRCUMSTANCES I WILL MAKE AN EXTREMELY LONG COMMENT IN THIS BLOG. IT IS NOT SUITABLE FOR A BLOG FORMAT, BUT THE DISCUSSION ALREADY STARTED, SO I'LL CONTINUE IT*
  
  SORRY READERS

• 

  written on 09-May-2009

  patencia says:

  Hi Dan, thanks for your comment. It was a long answer for a not-at-all developed reply to your paper. But since you answered and I feel I wasn’t very fair with you, let me elaborate a bit (however informally).
  
  Although I wasn’t clear about this, I understand that your paper is really against the argument from cinema, which, I agree, is fallacious. However, I take it that you concede that, in the case of film, editing is a cinematic (although non-photographic) means to achieve fictional representations. And I wonder whether you want to deny that specifically photographic editing (or similar photographic processes) is/are equally a means to achieve fictional representations in the case of photography.
  
  I take it that, in the case of cinema the editing process might be said to be non-photographic because you’re not really editing the still images themselves; yet, we say that it is nevertheless cinematic, because editing (in the way it’s done in cinema) is part of the cinematic practice. Now, I guess there’s a sense in which we can say editing can be also photographic: if you work on the still images themselves in the relevant way. And here we don’t need to talk about digital manipulation; there’s a long standing tradition of “editing” and working on prints and negatives during the developing processes (overlapping, blur, selective over and underexposing…). Moreover, this is not always done to deceive, trick or otherwise manipulate (in the bad sense of the word), as in the case of the fairy photos or similar cases (http://tinyurl.com/oc84hv). Rather, it is sometimes done with the explicit purpose of making unambiguously fictional images (the case of Duane Michals is the one I always use http://tinyurl.com/zlr6k).
  
  If you consider developing and laboratory work as an integral part of photography, you should concede, I guess, that editing is photographic too. And granted that cinematic editing contributes to cinematic fictional representation, I don’t see why photographic editing would not. This is basically the core of my objection.
  
  There are two reasons why I thought about the shark-seagull picture (thanks for pointing out that is a seagull):
  1.It is not a photograph that has gone through major digital alterations so that one can be easily tempted to claim that it has ceased to be a photograph (like cases like this http://tinyurl.com/ol7fq3 ) (actually, the editing job has been minor and perfectly doable by ‘analog’ means).
  2. Scruton claims that if there’s any fiction in cinema it is because you were filming a pre-cinematic (theatrical/dramatic) fictional representation: actors, props, etc. BUT in this case, you’re not photographing an animal “dressed up” like another (as inhttp://tinyurl.com/px6dh3). A real shark and a real seagull are causally responsible for their respective photographs, and there was no pre-photographic dramatic representation.

• 

  written on 09-May-2009

  patencia says:

  PART II
  
  Let me be more systematic now, and incorporate your answer.
  
  You say that we can take this image as a picture made by photographic means and, in that sense, it can be a fictional representation made by photographic means. So far, we agree (or sort of) in that this picture is fictionally capable. The disagreement comes when I claim it is a photograph and you say it is not. For you, the Sharkgull picture is rather, a pictorial type different from photography, and you argue for this claiming that it is part of our ordinary conception of photography that photographs are fictionally incompetent.
  
  So the argument is something like this:
  
  1.Photography is fictionally incompetent
  2.The Sharkgull picture is fictionally competent
  3.Hence, the Sharkgull picture is not a photograph.
  
  
  To support (1) you pose the case of the Shakespeare photo. But, if I get the example right, I think the only thing it proves is that we cannot have photographs of fictional entities (or of historical characters previous to the invention of photography); a claim that seems pretty reasonable, provided that one wants to maintain some metaphysical coherence. Yet, it does not prove that photographs cannot be fictionally competent by other photographic means. And here’s where the example of Joseph Finnes-Shakespeare is not analogous to the Sharkgull picture, I guess. In the Finnes-Shakespeare case you can say that the only way the picture can depict Shakespeare is to have Finnes pre-photographically dressed up like Shakespeare; otherwise, it is a photograph of Joseph Finnes. In the case of the Sharkgull picture, however, you certainly don’t have a photograph of a Sharkgull (Sharkgulls do not exist and hence do not reflect light) but you do have a photograph that depicts a Sharkgull by photographic means (photographic editing).
  
  
  Now some reasons why I think the Sharkgull picture is indeed a photograph. First, this picture would not be so interesting if it were not because people recognise it as a photograph. Second, if the people of your example are able to detect the mistake of the reporter (or her willingness to deceive them), it is because they understand the practice of photography and they are well aware that alterations are possible and, nowadays, very frequent. If they really believed that photography is fictionally incompetent, they would certainly come to believe there were Sharkgulls in some remote part of the world or that there was some animal or person dressed up as a strange creature in front of the camera. But surely, this is not the case. And finally, if our ordinary capacity to recognise types of pictures count, I don’t think people doubt that what they are looking at is a photograph—I certainly didn’t think it was a peculiar kind of picture.
  
  
  Let me know if I got something wrong… at 3 in the morning it is highly likely (although it wouldn’t be an excuse!)
  
  *I now prefer to say: a representation of a fictional entity by photographic means (which is not necessarily the same as a fictional representation)

• 

  written on 09-May-2009

  patencia says:

  OK. THIS WAS TOO MUCH.

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