Abstract

 [full article, abstract in English; only abstract in Lithuanian]
 Walton’s thesis of transparency of photographs has spurred much dispute among critics. One of the popular objections is spatial agnosticism, an argument that concerns the inertia of egocentric spatial information vis-a-vis a photograph. In this paper, I argue that spatial agnosticism fails. Spatial agnostics claim, for a wrong reason, that a photographic image cannot carry egocentric spatial information. I argue that it is the disjuncture of the photographic world in which the depicted object situated from the space in which the viewer of the photograph resides that renders the photograph spatially agnostic. It is the timeless photographic world rather than the photographic object that renders egocentric spatial information inert. With this new formulation of spatial agnosticism, I propose that spatial agnosticism needs to be coupled with the temporal dimension (the A-theory of time) in the efforts to refute the thesis of transparency of photographs.
Highlights
To see something transparently is to see it appear as it is
The advocates of the transparency thesis of photography do not take spatial and temporal factors as a necessary ontological condition for photographic seeing. They argue that the causal mechanism of photographic process warrants the transparency of photographs. They deny the intentional aspects of photography, which may have altered the visual properties of the photographed object, contribute to reducing the transparency of a photograph
I argue that the e-informationist arguments fall short to decisively refute the transparency thesis because the ontological role of temporal dimension has been largely omitted in their account of photographic viewing
Summary
To see something transparently is to see it appear as it is. Transparency in seeing gives us perceptual access to things. For the e-informationists, transparent seeing requires the spatial-temporal information of the perceived object to change correspondingly to the change of one’s bodily orientation.
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