Photography, Vision, and Representation

Abstract

Is there anything peculiarly "photographic" about photography -something which sets it apart from all other ways of making pictures? If there is, how important is it to our understanding of photographs? Are photographs so unlike other sorts of pictures as to require unique methods of interpretation and standards of evaluation? These questions may sound artificial, made up especially for the purpose of theorizing. But they have in fact been asked and answered not only by critics and photographers but by laymen. Furthermore, for most of this century the majority of critics and laymen alike have tended to answer these questions in the same way: that photographs and paintings differ in an important way and require different methods in interpretation precisely because photographs and paintings come into being in different ways. These answers are interesting because, even within the rather restricted classes of critics, photographers, and theorists, they are held in common by a wide variety of people who otherwise disagree strongly with each other-by people who think that photographs are inferior to paintings and people who think they are (in some ways, at least) superior; by people who believe that photographs ought to be "objective" and those who believe they should be "subjective"; by those who believe that it is impossible for photographers to "create" anything and by those who believe that they should at least try. Our purpose here is not to show that these answers are always, in every case, wrong, or that there is never anything to be gained by differentiating between photography and other visual arts, or that questions about how photographs come into being are never appropriate to any investigation. But we do want to suggest that they are a very small