An individual cannot be ‘captured’ in a photograph | Aeon Essays
Highlights
This type of tantalising ignorance will be lacking in our experience of a purely AI-generated image that we know to be such, even if it presents to us a scene featuring people in a way that means we might easily confuse it with a photograph. Consideration of suc digital images, whose creation didn’t depend on particular light events in the right way, can help us understand what is distinctive of photographs, even on a fairly permissive ‘new theory of photography’ that would classify some hard-to-categorise images, such as Gerhard Richter’s ‘Betty’ (1988), as photographs. ⤴️
the problem is that there is a tendency to overvalue or even fetishise veridicality when we move from contexts where the evidential status of photographs rightly matters to us more than anything else – the courtroom, the newspaper and the historical archive – to contexts where the aesthetic features of photographs are what we are being asked to consider most significant. ⤴️
Arbus’s empathetic approach is concerned with how human beings present themselves to others – their projections, rather than their essence – yet is stylistically all her own. If portrait photography simply invited us to look at people, there would be little room for recognising the distinctive stylistic virtues of Arbus’s work. ⤴️
discuss many of the moral issues that arise with respect to photography, but one particularly relevant issue has to do with our individual preferences that other people represent us in various ways and not others. Danto suggests that a photograph of a person ought to respect their own self-conception and will otherwise count as morally disrespectful. I agree with Bell that Danto’s idea can’t be right (although I also disagree with Bell’s own variation on it). Of course, we all wish to have ourselves represented to the world in some ways and not others, but the moral issues here are rather complex. ⤴️
our own representations of ourselves are often inaccurate, and either overly positive or overly negative. Being offered interpretations of ourselves by others can help us better understand who we are, and help us be more modest about our powers and rights to shape how others view us, as individuals ⤴️