Varieties of photographic representation

Abstract

Photography has become the most widespread form of pictorial communication and a significant artistic medium, yet philosophical analysis of it is still at a disconcertingly primitive level. Some contemporary discussions are barely distinguishable from the ‘But is it Art?’ debates of the 1890s. This is perhaps not so surprising for a medium that still awaits a truly great critic. However, more than 150 years after its invention, it is surely time for philosophers to take photography more seriously as a medium of communication and of art: Thus far the academic study of photography has largely been an intellectual backwater. Almost everything is still to be done.1

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 4 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.