Looking Again through Photographs: A Response to Edwin Martin

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Looking Again through Photographs: A Response to Edwin Martin Author(s): Kendall L. Walton Source: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 12, No. 4 (Summer, 1986), pp. 801-808Published by: University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1343441Accessed: 06-11-2015 21:23 UTC

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Critical Response

Looking Again through Photographs: A Response to Edwin Martin

Kendall L. Walton

My great-grandfather died before I was born. He never saw me. But I see him occasionally-when I look at photographs of him. They are not great photographs, by any means, but like most photographs they are transparent. We see things through them.

Edwin Martin objects. His response consists largely of citing examples of things which, he thinks, are obviously not transparent, and declaring that he finds no relevant difference between them and photographs: once we slide down the slippery slope as far as photographs there will be no stopping short of absurdity. The examples fail in their purpose, but they will help to clarify the reasons for the transparency of photographs. Several of them can be disposed of by noting that they jeopardize the transparency of (ordinary) photographs only if they jeopardize the very possibility of perception. The others appear to reflect a misconception of the issue before us and the nature of my claim.

To perceive something is, in part, to have perceptual experiences caused by the object in question. This is scarcely controversial. It is also uncontroversial that additional restrictions are needed-not all causes of one's visual experiences are objects of sight-although exactly what the required restrictions are is a notoriously tricky question. One important restriction is that the causation must be appropriately independent of human action ("mechanical," if you like), in a sense which I explained (pp. 263-64). This, I argued, is what distinguishes photographs from "handmade" pictures, which are not transparent. Seismograms and footprints are caused just as "mechanically" as ordinary photographs are. So

Critical Inquiry 12 (Summer 1986) ? 1986 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/86/1204-0010501.00. All rights reserved.

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802 Critical Response Kendall L. Walton

are photographs that are so badly exposed or focused that they fail to present images of the objects before the camera. So, also, are the visual experiences of those who look at seismograms, footprints, and such badly focused or exposed photographs. Yet we obviously do not see the causes of these things through them, Martin claims. How is it, then, that we see through ordinary photographs?

We needn't dwell long on the imageless photographs. Martin asks us to consider "photographs" (if indeed they deserve to be called that) which are so grossly underexposed as to be maximally and uniformly black; ones so grossly overexposed as to be pure white, as white as the photographic paper on which they are printed allows; and uniformly gray photographs made in the manner of suntans, by exposing photo- sensitive paper to unfocused light (see pp. 797, 800).'

As a result of a tragic accident, Mr. Black's pupils are permanently contracted so as to allow too little light into his eyes to activate the rods and cones of his retinas. Mr. White suffered an opposite but equally debilitating injury. His pupils are permanently dilated so as constantly to admit light of blinding brightness. Mrs. Grey is injured in such a way that the lenses of her eyes have had to be removed. Although the light reaching her retinas is of moderate intensity, it is not focused into images. Black reports seeing nothing but pitch blackness; White's visual images are of a uniform extreme brightness; Grey's are undifferentiated gray, though the shade of gray varies with the degree of illumination in her surroundings. All three are declared legally blind.2 Does their blindness raise any doubts about the ability of normal people with undamaged eyes to see the world around them? Of course not.

Are Martin's black, white, and gray photographs transparent? Do we see trees and houses and people when we look at them? Martin thinks not. He is right. Does their opacity raise any doubts about the transparency of ordinary, normally exposed and focused photographs? No. Not, that is, unless we are prepared to accept that all of us are as blind as Messrs. Black and White and Mrs. Grey.

These three blind people differ from sighted people and Martin's three homogeneous "photographs" from the photograph of my great- grandfather in various ways. In order to decide exactly what it is in virtue of which the former are blind and the latter opaque we need a more complete account of what it is to see than I attempted to provide in

Kendall L. Walton is professor of philosophy at the University of Michigan and author of a book on representation in the arts (forthcoming). His previous contribution to Critical Inquiry, "Transparent Pictures: On the Nature of Photographic Realism," appeared in the December 1984 issue.


Critical Inquiry Summer 1986 803

"Transparent Pictures." But there is no dearth of possibilities, some of them suggested by my discussion.

The photograph of my great-grandfather is richly dependent, both counterfactually and causally, on my great-grandfather as he was when it was taken (see pp. 263-64.) It would have turned out differently had he been absent from the scene, or had he worn different clothes or a different expression, or held his head differently. But Martin's black and white photographic prints, especially, are insensitive to what was before the camera when the shutter was snapped. All such grossly over- or underexposed photographs look the same, he says. It makes no difference whether the scene contains a dinosaur or a piranha fish or a cathedral or a tomato; the result is pure white, or pitch black, in any case. Some have claimed that to see something one's visual experiences must depend counterfactually on what is seen.' My experiences when I look at the photograph depend counterfactually on my great-grandfather, as the photograph itself does; had he been different, my experiences would have been different. But the visual experiences of those who look at Martin's black and white prints are not thus dependent on what was before the camera. The prints will look black, or white, no matter (almost) what the scene was like.

One way to put this is to say that my great-grandfather's photograph contains a great deal of information about the scene, whereas Martin's black and white prints contain little or none. (If this is the reason why the former is transparent and the latter are not, we should not conclude that to perceive something one must possess or have access to information about it. We may value an object for the fact that it contains information about something important to us, even if we don't expect actually to learn about it from the object.)

Some will prefer to understand perception in causal rather than counterfactual terms (if causation is not to be explained in terms of counterfactuals). My great-grandfather was a cause of his photograph and of the visual experiences occasioned by it. If Martin's black and white prints and the experiences derived from them would have been as they are no matter what was before the camera, what happened actually to be there cannot very comfortably be said to have caused them; the cause was simply the opening of the shutter. A more important difference, however, is that whereas many particular features of my great-grandfather and his surroundings are causally responsible for features of his photograph and my visual experiences, the black and white prints and the visual experiences of those who look at them do not depend causally on the specific characteristics of the relevant scenes (or at least not on very many of them).

What about the unfocused gray print? It does depend causally and counterfactually on features of the relevant scene-but barely. So does a suntan. The tone of the print and the tan are caused by the intensity



of illumination received and would have been different had the illumination been significantly greater or less than it was. Actually, even the white and black prints are not entirely unaffected by the scenes in question. If the scene had been without any illumination at all, blacker than the blackest cave, the overexposed print would have been black rather than white. Presumably a scene of extraordinary brightness would have reg- istered even on (what would otherwise have been) the grossly underexposed print. So in all three examples one feature of the actual scene is causally efficacious: there having been a certain degree of overall illumination (or merely a less than extraordinarily high or extraordinarily low degree of illumination).

In none of these cases is there anything like the enormously detailed causal and counterfactual dependence of my great-grandfather's photograph and the visual experiences it produces in me on what it is a photograph of. The slightest change in my great-grandfather's expression or stance while the portrait was being taken, the addition or subtraction of a tie or a wrinkle or a sparkle in his eyes, subtle changes in the direction or intensity of the lighting, are likely to have made a difference. Such rich dependence on their scenes is characteristic of ordinary photographs generally, including photographs which are severely over- or underexposed or badly focused short of the elimination of all contrast. Even a photograph printed with such high contrast as to allow only two tones, a mere silhouette, reflects a great many features of shape and position.

Black, White, and Grey are like viewers of the black, white, and gray prints. Their visual experiences are insensitive to and unaffected by all features of the scene save the overall intensity of illumination. If this is why they are blind, our inability to see through the black and white and gray photographs, their opacity, is to be explained similarly. There is no threat to the ability of normal viewers to see things before their eyes, nor to our ability to see through ordinary photographs.

A different but not unrelated possibility would be to understand perception as requiring some sort of recognition or noticing of what is perceived. Initial intuitions about this proposal will be mixed. Did you see Mr. X downtown yesterday? Suppose he crossed your field of vision without your realizing that it was he. Did you see him without recognizing him, or fail to see him? Suppose that you noticed a crowd of which Mr. X was a part and your eyes focused on that part of the crowd, but you did not recognize him, not even as a person or as a separate entity. Did you see him? There are various ways in which the idea that perception requires recognition or noticing might be spelled out. But any such requirement would account nicely for the opacity of Martin's homogeneous prints. On viewing them one does not notice trees or houses or people, or recognize them, not even as mere things. I do notice my great-grandfather and recognize him (as a person and as my great-grandfather), however, when I see his photograph.



It is evident that there is plenty of room to maneuver in the gap between the grossly over- and underexposed and unfocused photographs (and also the suntan) on the one hand, and ordinary photographs on the other. But there seems not to be a significant gap between (ordinary) photographs and some of Martin's other examples. What about footprints? Do we see the feet of dinosaurs by looking at their footprints? Footprints are richly dependent, causally and counterfactually, on the feet that made them, and (unless we claim on other grounds that one does not see the feet) there seems no reason to deny that, frequently, in looking at a footprint one recognizes or notices a foot. Fine. Let's allow that footprints are transparent.4

"But we don't talk that way." Maybe not. But it would hardly be a strain to do so. Speaking of "seeing a person" when we see his death mask (or life mask) comes easily enough, as indeed does speaking of '"seeing" Johnny Carson on television and John Wayne in the movies. And who is to say that in so speaking we are not speaking literally? Certainly footprints are no less transparent than death masks. (We might well treasure preserved footprints of our ancestors as we do photographs, although no doubt most of us would prefer death masks; I would rather see my great-grandfather's face than his feet.)

But how we actually talk is not the point anyway. I am proposing something of a conceptual revision, a different way of thinking about things, which is bound to involve changes in what we say. It consists partly in recognizing important affinities between ordinary cases of seeing and (what I call) seeing by means of mirrors, microscopes, television hookups, photographs, and also death masks and footprints. I suggest regarding this class of cases as a "natural kind."5

It is convenient and natural to express my point in terms of vision, as I have done, allowing that we sometimes see our deceased ancestors and the feet of dinosaurs as well as the objects presently before our eyes. (We needn't decide whether this involves an extension of the meaning of "see," or a change in our beliefs about when we see, or some of both. This question may have no answer, in any case.) But it wouldn't matter if we used some other word in place of "see."6 This should not be of any comfort to Martin, unless what bothers him is merely (what he may take to be) my tampering with ordinary English. The issue is not one of terminology, a mere quibble about words. If Martin objects to the re- conceptualization I express in speaking of "seeing" things through photographs, he won't like it any better if it is expressed in different words.

That "seeing" through photographs, through television circuits, mirrors and telescopes, and also seeing "directly" are best bundled together is suggested, first, by the slipperiness of the slope on which they lie (see p. 252). Martin advocates digging in our heels before we come to photographs. But there seems no way to stop in time without doing violence to the landscape. We would need to find not just any old change in the



terrain- there are lots of them-but one significant enough to be worth stopping at. Martin's two suggested "natural breaking points" (p. 800) are hardly inviting. Does the important change come with the use of optical instruments which project real images rather than merely virtual ones? If so, we would see through simple magnifying glasses but not through ordinary compound microscopes, since the lower lens of a compound microscope produces a real image which serves as an object for the upper lens. I doubt that Martin will be eager to draw the line here. Moreover, the lenses in our eyes project real images onto our retinas. If this is not a cause of universal blindness, why should the fact that a compound microscope or the lens of a camera produces real images prevent us from seeing with its assistance?

Is the length of the causal chain leading from the object to the viewer's perceptual experiences relevant? Hardly. Surely no one who is prepared to allow that we see things in (through) mirrors will object to the idea that one can see through a series of two or 10,000 mirrors arranged to relay light from objects to the viewer.

Does seeing require that light emitted by or reflected from the object enter the eyes of the viewer? (This is a suggestion Martin did not make.) How far must the light reach? It never gets all the way to our visual experiences (whatever that might mean). At most it goes as far as the perceiver's retinas, where it activates the rods and cones producing non- optical signals which are carried by the optic nerve to the brain. Why should it matter if the light signals from the object are transformed into another medium somewhat earlier in the process, for example, when the light exposes the film in a camera?

I claimed that things which are difficult to distinguish by looking at their photographs are, generally, things which are similar in some respect.' Martin rightly points out that, for some kinds of photographs anyway, this correspondence is not perfect (see p. 799). This suggests, at most, that photographs or some kinds of them are not perfectly transparent, that not all of the features of objects which can be seen by looking at them directly can be seen by looking at them through photographs. That is true in any case. It is obvious that we don't see colors through black- and-white photographs. Insofar as the absence of color tends to obscure shapes, we may fail to perceive shapes or perceive them imperfectly. The same is true, of course, when we see things, directly, in light so dim that colors are not visible or through tinted glasses which obscure or distort color relationships. Nevertheless we do see in dim light and through tinted glasses, and we do see through black-and-white photographs. The correspondence between confusability and similarity when we see via black-and-white photographs, though imperfect, is enormous. The tend- ency of orthochromatic film to confuse reds and blacks lessens it only slightly, as does the use of common color filters. It is extensive even when



we see through what Martin calls the "extreme" examples of X rays and infrared photographs. We are much more likely to make small mistakes of shape, size, and position than large ones, for the most part, when we perceive via photographs of any of these sorts.

The same is true of many drastically distorting mirrors. A mirror might make a horse look like a hearse, as Martin points out (p. 799).8 (Horses seen directly, without the help of mirrors, can also look like hearses.) But even a mirror which has this effect is likely to be such that many or most small discriminations-in size, shape, position, and so on-are more difficult to make through it than larger ones are. The correspondences between discriminability and similarity may be fewer in the case of certain truly exotic mirrors, for example, ones in which some parts of an object are reflected more than once and some more often than others. Even so, the correspondences may well hold for small- scale shape properties, if not for large-scale ones. Like photographic constructions made from multiple negatives (see p. 269), small parts of a scene may be visible through the mirror(s) even if large ones are not. Suppose that even correspondences such as these fail to hold. Well, consider a complicated battery of mirrors cleverly designed to produce images that look like words, like appropriate linguistic descriptions of the objects. Here we have the extreme, wholesale breakdown of the correspondences in question. This, of course, is just the kind of machine I described on page 270. We don't see things by means of it, and for exactly the reason I gave.

In short, I see no reason to repent. We do see through photographs. Not perfectly. Not always, perhaps (though this will depend on what we choose to count as "photographs"). But usually, and often very well. This conclusion seems more inevitable than incredible, on reflection, however startling it might be at first. It is reinforced, moreover, by the contribution it makes to an explanation of the peculiar powers of photography. Once we recognize the affinity between looking at a photograph of something and looking at it directly our responses to photographs become much easier to understand. Why do photographs, even poorly exposed and focused ones, seem more an invasion of privacy than do paintings or drawings of the same subject? Because the former are transparent and the latter are not. Why is the shock of what appears to be a photograph of a nude couple (fig. 4 in "Transparent Pictures") alleviated so dramatically when we learn that it is a photograph merely of a life-sized sculpture? Why do we feel uncomfortably "close" to Chuck Close (fig. 3) when we think we are seeing his photograph, and much less so after realizing that the picture is a painting rather than a photograph? Because at first we think we are actually seeing the nude couple or Chuck Close, and later discover that we are not. If we deny the transparency of photographs we will still be groping for explanations.



1. Joel Snyder uses examples like these in his "Picturing Vision," Critical Inquiry 6 (Spring 1980): 508.

2. We might allow that Grey, at least, sees the light which enters her eyes, or the state of affairs of there being a certain rough degree of illumination in her immediate environment; she sees what earthworms and other organisms with similarly primitive eyes (ocelli) see. She does not see people and buildings and trees.

3. Cf. David Lewis, "Veridical Hallucination and Prosthetic Vision," Australasian Journal of Philosophy 58 (Sept. 1980): 239-49.

4. The seismogram has fairly extensive though still very one-dimensional causal and counterfactual dependence on the earthquake. Perhaps it should be treated however one chooses to treat photographic silhouettes. What about the voiceprint? It is likely that only experts recognize voices from voiceprints in a sense in which recognition is necessary for seeing. But do even experts see the voice? Let's say that they perceive it, without worrying about whether this sort of perception should count as vision.

5. I don't mean that it is natural apart from human beings and their interests and proclivities. What needs to be explained is not photographs as they are "in themselves," but the ways in which they are experienced and their place in our culture. The conceptual revision I am proposing is not meant to change how we experience photographs, but how we think of and describe our experiences of them.

6. Though if we did we would have to guard against the impression that within this "natural kind" is another, smaller one, comprising roughly those cases in which we now speak of "seeing" (or some subset of them in which, by someone's lights, the term is used literally). This is one reason why the position I advocate is most felicitously expressed by saying that we "see" through photographs.

7. Actually, I modified this claim in several ways; see pp. 271-72. 8. If this means that a horse seen through a distorting mirror might look like a hearse

does when seen directly or through a plane mirror, it is irrelevant to our purpose. I take the case to be one in which, given a particular distorting mirror, horses seen through it look like hearses seen through it.


Looking Again through Photographs: A Response to Edwin Martin

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