SCOTT WALDEN, ed. Photography and Philosophy: Essays on the Pencil of Nature.

Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008, xii + 325 pp., $79.95 cloth.

Putting together a collection of new essays is difficult. If contributors are given free
reign to write on anything relating to a specific topic, the result is usually more a
reflection of their independent interests than a coherent collection of essays. If the editor
tries to ensure coherence by dictating the topics to be addressed by individual authors,
their contributions usually end up being more like encyclopedia entries than original
essays. One of the most attractive features of Scott Walden's collection, Photography
and Philosophy: Essays on the Pencil of Nature, is that it successfully avoids both of
these pitfalls. Walden does this by structuring the volume around a series of responses to
two influential, previously published essays in the philosophy of photography, both of
which are reprinted in the volume. The resulting collection has the feel of an extended
conversation on a variety of related topics, by a community of philosophers who are
intimately familiar with one another's work. The overarching theme of their conversation
is the philosophical significance of the mechanical nature of photography.

The two previously published essays that anchor Walden's volume are Kendall Walton's
"Transparent Pictures" and Roger Scruton's "Photography and Representation". (There is
also a previously published piece by Arthur Danto, but it isn't part of the main
conversation of the book.) Walton's and Scruton's essays partake in the time-honored
tradition of provoking philosophical discussion and debate by saying something that no
one could really believe (or, at least, something that one might think no one could really
believe). Photography has a long history of leading people to make philosophically
provocative claims, but what makes Walton's and Scruton's essays particularly fruitful is
that they actually provide arguments. Walton, for instance, argues that looking at
photographs is akin to looking through telescopes into the past. He claims that we
literally see through photographs into the past and thereby come into direct contact with
the actual states of affairs that they depict. This capacity of photographs gives them
special epistemic status, because we are literally seeing something that once happened.
In order to explain this capacity of photographs, Walton invokes the mechanical nature of
photography, which he takes to involve the way in which the content of photographs is
independent of the content of photographers' beliefs about what their photographs depict.
Scruton's argument starts from a similar observation, that the mechanical nature of
photography makes it possible to make representations that do not express their makers'
thoughts about what they are representing. Scruton takes this possibility of photography
to imply that the only aesthetic interest we can take in photographs is with regard to the
aesthetic properties of the states of affairs that they depict. Once again, the idea is that
we literally see through photographs to the actual states of affairs they depict. On both
Walton's and Scruton's accounts, photographs are like windows; in this sense, they aren't
really representations at all. Scruton takes this to imply that photography, as such, cannot
be an art form, because it cannot itself be used to represent or express an artist's thoughts
or feelings.

As you might imagine, many of the new essays written for this volume take issue with
Walton's and Scruton's provocative claims. Cynthia Freeland offers an alternative

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explanation for the sense of direct contact that photographs sometimes provide: she
argues that this isn't because of photography's special epistemic status, but because
photographs participate in the long tradition of making and using portraits in an attempt
to maintain contact with the dead. It's unclear whether this implies that if one is skeptical
about pre-photographic attempts to use portraits to maintain contact with the dead, one
should be similarly skeptical of the sense of direct contact that photographic portraits
sometimes provide; or, whether the mechanical nature of photography somehow allows it
to succeed at doing something that previous forms of portraiture attempted but failed to
do. Aaron Meskin and Jonathan Cohen critique the claim that we literally see through
photographs on the grounds that photographs only provide us with information about how
objects look, not where they are spatially located. (Does this imply that we wouldn't see
through a sufficiently complicated periscope, if it prevented us from spatially locating the
objects we see through it?) Like Freeland, they propose to explain the sense of direct
contact photography provides in terms of psychological facts about the viewers of
photographs, rather than in terms of any sort of special epistemic status of photographs
themselves.

Scott Walden's own contribution attempts to refine Walton's account of the special
epistemic status of photographs. Although he grants that the mechanical nature of
photography is no guarantee of the truth of the beliefs we form from looking at them, he
nonetheless thinks that a suitably refined account of it justifies thinking of photographs as
an epistemically privileged sort of representation. I will return to this idea, which runs
throughout the volume, at the end of my review. Barbara Savendoff explores some of the
ways in which photographers are able to exploit the documentary authority of
photography for artistic ends.

The two pieces which most directly engage with Scruton's essay are by David Davies and
Patrick Maynard. They both argue against Scruton's claim that our only aesthetic interest
in photographs is in the aesthetic properties of the states of affairs that they depict, on the
grounds that the composition of photographic images involves considerable amount of
input from the photographers themselves. Maynard's essay, in particular, introduces and
discusses a number of useful concepts for understanding the successful composition of
photographs (e.g., negative space, dynamics, and rhythm). Both essays also give reasons
for thinking that one of the more interesting things about photography is precisely
photographers' lack of control over the actual layout in the world of the states of affairs
that their photographs depict. As Maynard puts this point, "[s]uccessful fishers are not
criticized for not having placed the fish on their hooks or in their nets" (207).

The remaining new essays in the volume, by Dominick Lopes, Kendall Walton (his
second essay in the volume), Noël Carroll, and Gregory Currie, do not directly engage
with the previously published essays by Walton and Scruton, but rather discuss related
issues, especially with regard to aesthetic issues concerning the similarities and
differences between photography and film. As I noted above, however, the overarching
theme of this volume concerns the philosophical significance of the mechanical nature of
photography. Several of the writers follow Walton in thinking that there is a deep
difference between mechanically produced photographs and handmade images, and that

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we can explain this difference in terms of the way in which the content of photographs is
independent of the content of photographers' beliefs about what their photographs depict.
I myself am skeptical about such an explanation, for two reasons. First, this cannot be
the right way to formulate a distinction between photographs and handmade images,
since it is possible to create handmade images that equally well bypass the beliefs of their
makers about what they depict. Tracing the outline shapes of objects seen through a
window will produce a handmade image that nonetheless bypasses its maker's beliefs
about the objects depicted. Second, and more importantly, the possibility of such
handmade images undermines Walton's explanation for thinking that photographs put us
in direct contact with the states of affairs they depict, since we don't experience such
handmade images as putting us in direct contact with what they represent. In short, if
there is any substance to the idea that photographs put us in direct contact with what they
depict, it must be because of something else about them.

As a whole, Walden's collection is a valuable addition to the philosophical literature on

photography. It is well organized and contains a sustained discussion of many of the
more provocative claims that philosophers have made about photography. It's still an
open question whether any of these claims are true, but rather than simply dwelling upon
the banal truths that we all already agree upon, it's a lot more interesting to start, as
Walden does, with the moments when philosophers are led to say things that are almost
impossible to believe, and work from there.

Zed Adams
New School for Social Research