In this short book Diarmuid Costello presents a valuable new framework for philosophical discussion on photography. Costello aims ‘to treat photography philosophically’ (2). He thoroughly investigates our intuitions about the essence of photography, showing that the most sophisticated ‘theoretical’—in a broad sense—claims often turn out to be only reformulations of basic folk intuitions about some uses of photography or paradigmatic examples that are unduly taken to stand for photography per se. Debunking many fallacious distinctions, he introduces new questions that philosophers could ask about photography—as an imaging process first, but also as a set of practices. Theoretical texts about photography have focused on two distinct dimensions of photographic practices: the epistemic dimension and the aesthetic/artistic dimension, which happens to parallel the distinction between mechanical and handmade pictures. Either ‘photographs are taken to be accurate sources of information about the world because a machine rather than a human being does the recording’ and therefore support inferences about the world, or they are appreciated aesthetically insofar as the artist’s intentions are made visible by departing from the pure causal mechanism of photography (4). The tension between handmade and mechanical images or between epistemic capabilities and aesthetic uses is not new and has already been well documented. Still, the way Costello aims to escape the tension is new: it is not enough to distinguish between an ‘information-preserving pure photography’ and a ‘non-information-preserving impure photographic art’ because that is only a way to say that photography can be objective or artistic but not both. Rather than ‘saving the possibility of photographic art, but only at the cost of denying its purity’, Costello considers the possibility of pure photography being art, in virtue of its being pure photography. Demonstrating this possibility is a serious challenge. By clarifying the debates and focusing on two different ways of dealing philosophically with photography (namely Orthodoxy versus New Theory), Costello invites the reader to choose a side and at the same time choose the kind of questions that one thinks philosophy should answer. The boundary between Orthodoxy and New Theory results from the way one considers the opposition between hand-made and machine-made images. If you regard the distinction as strict, if you hold that it parallels the distinction between painting and photography and if this makes it difficult to account for the photographer’s agency, then you are on the side of Orthodoxy. If you hold that both categories cut across one another, if you do not assume that painting and photography are distinct by nature and if you criticize the identification of the essence of photography with the recording event, and criticize the analogy between a trace and a photograph, then you are a New Theorist. One implicit aim of the book is to orient research in good directions. To make progress, Costello starts by divesting the existing views of all the unproved assumptions or unclear intuitions and, for several cases, one must admit that after his criticism, backwards steps seem unlikely. To give one example, he shows that by comparing photography and imprinting, André Bazin conflates the automatic dimension of the image-rendering process with its natural dimension: ‘In sum, a process can be both natural and causal (sunburn, freckles) or both causal and automatic (photography), but one and the same process cannot be both natural and automatic—if “natural” is taken, as it is by Bazin, to contrast with “human”’ (42).1
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Aug 27, 2018
Guillaume Mouleux 
Open Access
