Four Arts of Photography

An Essay in Philosophy

Dominic McIver Lopes

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781119056522
  9781119053170
• eBook ISBN:
  9781119053293
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Aesthetics in Philosophy

Four Arts of Photography explores the history of photography through the lens of philosophy and proposes a new scholarly understanding of the art form for the 21st century.

• Re-examines the history of art photography through four major photographic movements and with case studies of representative images
• Employs a top-down, theory to case approach, as well as a bottom-up, case to theory approach
• Advances a new theory regarding the nature of photography that is grounded in technology but doesn't place it in opposition to painting
• Includes commentaries by two leading philosophers of photography, Diarmuid Costello and Cynthia A. Freeland

Notes

1 Donald Davidson, “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme,” Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 47 (1974), p. 5. 2 Edgar Allen Poe, “The Daguerreotype,” Alexander's Weekly Messenger 4.3 (1840), p. 4; and Elizabeth Eastlake, “Photography,” Quarterly Review 101 (1857), p. 442. 3 Eastlake, “Photography,” p. 442. 4 Pierre Bourdieu, Photography: A Middle-brow Art, trans, Shaun Whiteside (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), p. 47; Susan Sontag, On Photography (London: Penguin, 1977), p. 8. 5 Retouched photographs were exhibited and caused much public clamor as early as the 1850s. Sontag, On Photography, p. 86. 6 For example, Noam M. Elcott, “The Shadow of the World: James Welling's Cameraless and Abstract Photography,” Aperture 190 (Spring 2008), pp. 30–8. 7 Elaine Scarry, “Imagining Flowers: Perceptual Mimesis (Particularly Delphinium),” Representations 57 (1997), pp. 90–115. 8 Steel Stillman, “In the Studio: James Welling with Steel Stillman,” Art in America (February 2011), p. 57. 9 Joshua Reynolds, Discourses, ed. Edward Gilpin Johnson (Chicago: McClurg, 1891), p. 316. 10 Henry Fox Talbot, “Calotype (Photogenic) Drawing,” The Literary Gazette 1256 (1841), p. 108. 11 Eastlake, “Photography,” p. 445 and 466. 12 Quoted in Patrick Maynard, The Engine of Visualization: Thinking Through Photography (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), p. 268. 13 Charles Baudelaire, “The Modern Public and Photography,” trans. Jonathan Mayne, Classic Essays on Photography, ed. Alan Trachtenberg (Stony Creek: Lete's Island Books, 1980), p. 88. See also William J. Newton, “Upon Photography in an Artistic View, and Its Relations to the Arts,” Journal of the Photographic Society 1 (1853), p. 6. 14 Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre, “Daguerreotype,” Classic Essays on Photography, p. 13. 15 Oliver Wendell Holmes, “The Stereoscope and the Stereograph,” The Atlantic 3.20 (June 1859), pp. 738–48. 16 Dominique François Arago, “Report,” trans. E. Epstean, Classic Essays on Photography, p. 19. 17 Daguerre, “Daguerreotype,” p. 13. Other early writers who echo this include Arago, “Report,” p. 18; Poe, “The Daguerreotype,” p. 4; Eastlake, “Photography,” p. 453. 18 See Berenice Abbott, “Photography at the Crossroads,” Universal Photo Almanac (1951), pp. 46–7. 19 Talbot, “Calotype,” p. 108. 20 Holmes, “The Stereoscope and the Stereograph,” pp. 738–48. 21 Eastlake, “Photography,” p. 466. 22 Eastlake, “Photography,” p. 462. 23 Eastlake, “Photography,” p. 460. 24 G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 43. 25 Jan von Brevern, “Resemblance after Photography,” Representations 123.1 (2013), pp. 1–22. 26 Peter Henry Emerson, “Death of Naturalistic Photography,” Photographic Theory: A Historical Anthology, ed. Andrew E. Hershberger (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014), p. 89. 27 Henry Peach Robinson, The Elements of a Pictorial Photograph (London: Percy Lund, 1896), p. 70. 28 Robinson, The Elements of a Pictorial Photograph, p. 66. 29 Robinson, The Elements of a Pictorial Photograph, p. 70. 30 Robinson, The Elements of a Pictorial Photograph, p. 70. 31 Peter Henry Emerson, Naturalistic Photography for Students of the Art (London: Sampson, Low, Marston,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Notes on Author and Contributors
• Preface
• Wonderment to Puzzlement
• How to Do Things with Theory
• To Possess Other Eyes
• Thinking Through Photographs
• A New Theory of Photography
• Lyricism
• The Knowing Eye
• Abstraction
• Crosscurrents and Boundary Conditions
• Appendix: The Skeptic’s Argument
• Doing Justice to the Art in Photography
• Four Thoughts about Four Arts of Photography
• Notes
• Index
• End User License Agreement