What is a photograph? Is photography an art, or a source of knowledge about the world? If the camera records mechanically is there a human element in photography?
In On Photography: A Philosophical Inquiry Diarmuid Costello examines these fascinating questions and more. In so doing he introduces some of the fundamental topics and debates about the very nature of photography, with the help of several photographic images from the work of Hannah Starkey, James Welling, and Gerhard Richter.
He begins with the roots of thinking about photography in the 1830s and Victorian debates about photography's standing as art, through to Twentieth Century Modernism and post-War cultural criticism. From this emerged the orthodox view of photography: because the camera documents whatever is put before it photography provides a wealth of detail, yet is incapable of artistic "vision" or imagination - for many critics and theorists an indispensable element of art. Costello draws on the work of photographers and theorists including Paul Strand, Edward Weston, Laszlo Moholy-Naagy, Siegfried Kracauer, Andre Bazin and Stanley Cavell to illustrate this fundamental tension within photography, examining important issues such as experimentalism realism. He then considers the arguments of philosophers such as Roger Scruton and Kendall Walton, who tackle perennial problems such as photography as an art as well as new challenges: if they are tools for recording reality can photographs represent fictions; is photography best understood as a kind of "transparency", a medium through which we can view the world? He concludes by examining photographic agency in a digital age.
Written in a clear and engaging style On Photography: A Philosophical Inquiry is essential reading for anyone interested in the philosophy of photography, aesthetics, art, and visual studies.
Diarmuid Costello is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Warwick, UK.
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