Category: Photography

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Critical Inquiry – Special Issue on Photography

The  Summer 2012 issue of Critical Inquiry is devoted to the philosophy of photography, in particular, questions of automatism and agency. The editors of the Special Issue on Photography, Diarmuid Costello and Margaret Iversen, point out that two key papers published in Critical Inquiry have had a particular impact on the debate in philosophy of photography: Roger Scruton’s argument that photography is not a representational art in “Photography and Representation” and Kendall Walton’s “Transparent Pictures.”

The Contributors to the issue include philosophers, photographers, and art historians: Carol Armstrong, Diarmuid Costello, Margaret Iversen, Robin Kelsey, Susan Laxton, Dominic McIver Lopes, Patrick Maynard, and Jeff Wall.

Unfortunately, the issue is not available open access.

[Edited from Photomedia Forum post by T.Neugebauer from Sep 27, 2012 ]

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thoughts and imagination

We seem to be in a constant search for replacement and substitution, never actually fully and completely giving anything up.  I think Krishnamurti talks about this as well. We are, as Goethe explains in The Sorrows of Young Werther, like children, rarely changing, and when we do change, it is not for the better – we move away from living in the moment and become fearful of showing our emotions. To live, ‘in the moment’ would mean giving full and complete attention to life, as it unfolds, not giving in to memory’s temptations, but what about imagination? Le mois de la photo in Montreal has the theme of ‘Image and Imagination’ this year.

Is imagination just thought, disguised by the intellect so as not to appear as memory or is it something which holds the secrets of creativity? Socrates believed that our intuitive knowledge and creativity is in fact the memory of another world.

[Photomedia Forum post by T.Neugebauer from June 22, 2005]