On the Epistemic Value of Photographs

The photograph is the only picture that can truly convey information, even if it is technically faulty and the object can barely be identified. A painting of a murder is of no interest whatever; but a photograph of a murder fascinates everyone. — Gerhard Richter, quoted in Obrist, 1995, 56–57. Many have held that photographs give us a firmer epistemic connection to the world than do other depictive representations. To take just one example, Bazin famously claimed that “The objective nature of photography confers on it a quality of credibility absent from all other picture-making ” (Bazin, 1967, 14). Unfortunately, while the intuition in question is widely shared, it has remained poorly understood. In this paper we propose to explain the special epistemic status of photographs. We take as our starting place (in §1) Kendall Walton’s startling proposal that photographs are special because they are “transparent” Walton, 1984 — that is, that they are special because, unlike other depictive representations, they enable us literally to see their depicta. 1 Walton’s proposal has not convinced many; however, it has proven surprisingly difficult to say just what is wrong about the transparency thesis. In §§2–4 we’ll rise to this challenge and show why photographs are not transparent in Walton’s sense. Finally, in §§5–7 we’ll propose and defend a novel diagnosis of what is epistemically special about photographs. 1 Transparency and Photographs In saying that photographs are transparent, Walton means that visually attending to a photograph enables us to see something numerically distinct from that ∗Some of the material in this paper appeared (in an earlier version) in a shorter paper entitled “Photographs are Not Transparent ” that we presented at the 2003 Pacific Division meeting of the American Society for Aesthetics. This work is fully collaborative; the authors are listed alphabetically.