by Jon Lackman | 18 May 2007 | Photography
In a recent article by master’s journalism student John Mitchell, philosopher Robert Sokolowski muses on photography:
What is a photograph, anyway? At a time when Adobe Photoshop allows designers to cut, crop, rotate, resize, recolor, and reconstitute any image they please, it’s not always so easy to tell. Sokolowski says the difference between a photograph and a painting is rooted in the reason photographs can be used as evidence in a court of law and paintings cannot: “A photograph is a piece of proof because it’s an effect. It’s a natural effect of nature impressing on a photographic plate certain light rays that come from the fact that those people were there. It’s like a footprint. Now, a painting does something else. It might bring out some truth about a person, but it’s really the artist whose insight is operating there, and not nature.” [...] “A painting is one image,” [Sokolowski] writes, “just as an argument or a sentence is one statement, but the painting also contains parts, which in turn also are pictures, and the parts are placed by the artist into an ordered whole.” With the introduction of Photoshop, the same has become true of photos. Editors can now break a photo of a football player into its individual parts and place them where they please. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it does require a greater sensitivity to the photo’s original meaning [...] Sokolowski sees a philosophical problem in journalistic photo illustrations becoming works of art. “The philosophical question is, to what extent are photographs really photographs anymore?” he said. “A photo illustration is living off a photograph because, until now, people have assumed a photograph is a real trace of a thing, but in fact it’s not. Now, it’s almost as though this situation is only going to last about ten years or so, because sooner or later people won’t trust photographs anymore. They’re going to figure no matter what they see is a composite.”
