BOOK REVIEW
On Photography: A Philosophical Inquiry
DIARMUID COSTELLO  possibility of pure photography being art, in virtue of
Routledge. 2017. pp. 182. £19.99 (pbk)
In this short book Diarmuid  Costello presents a val-
uable new framework for philosophical discussion
on photography. Costello aims  ‘to treat photography
philosophically’ (2). He thoroughly investigates our
intuitions about the essence of photography, showing
that the most sophisticated ‘theoretical’—in a broad
sense—claims often turn out to be only reformula-
tions of basic folk intuitions about some uses of photog-
raphy or paradigmatic examples that are unduly taken
to stand for photography per se. Debunking many
fallacious distinctions, he introduces new questions
that philosophers could ask about photography—as
an imaging process first, but also as a set of practices.
Theoretical texts about photography have focused on
two distinct dimensions of photographic practices: the
epistemic dimension and the aesthetic/artistic dimen-
sion, which happens to parallel the distinction between
mechanical and handmade pictures. Either ‘photo-
graphs are taken to be accurate sources of informa-
tion about the world because a machine rather than a
human being does the recording’ and therefore support
inferences about the world, or they are appreciated aes-
thetically insofar as the artist’s intentions are made vis-
ible by departing from the pure causal mechanism of
photography (4). The tension between handmade and
mechanical images or between epistemic capabilities
and aesthetic uses is not new and has already been well
documented. Still, the way Costello aims to escape the
tension is new: it is not enough to distinguish between
an ‘information-preserving pure photography’ and
a ‘non-information-preserving impure photographic
art’ because that is only a way to say that photography
can be objective or artistic but not both. Rather than
‘saving the possibility of photographic art, but only at
British Journal of Aesthetics Vol. 58 | Number 4 | October 2018 | pp. 489–492
© British Society of Aesthetics 2018. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the British Society of Aesthetics.
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the cost of denying its purity’, Costello considers the
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its being pure photography. Demonstrating this possi-
bility is a serious challenge. By clarifying the debates
and focusing on two different ways of dealing philo-
sophically with photography (namely Orthodoxy ver-
sus New Theory), Costello invites the reader to choose
a side and at the same time choose the kind of questions
that one thinks philosophy should answer. The bound-
ary between Orthodoxy and New Theory results from
the way one considers the opposition between hand-
made and machine-made images. If  you regard the
distinction as strict, if  you hold that it parallels the
distinction between painting and photography and if
this makes it difficult to account for the photographer’s
agency, then you are on the side of Orthodoxy. If you
hold that both categories cut across one another, if you
do not assume that painting and photography are dis-
tinct by nature and if you criticize the identification of
the essence of photography with the recording event,
and criticize the analogy between a trace and a photo-
graph, then you are a New Theorist. One implicit aim
of the book is to orient research in good directions. To
make progress, Costello starts by divesting the existing
views of all the unproved assumptions or unclear intu-
itions and, for several cases, one must admit that after
his criticism, backwards steps seem unlikely. To give
one example, he shows that by comparing photography
and imprinting, André  Bazin conflates the automatic
dimension of the image-rendering process with its nat-
ural dimension: ‘In sum, a process can be both natu-
ral and causal (sunburn, freckles) or both causal and
automatic (photography), but one and the same process
cannot be both natural and automatic—if “natural” is
taken, as it is by Bazin, to contrast with “human”’ (42).1
1
André Bazin, ‘Ontology of the Photographic Image’, in his What is
Cinema?, vol. 1 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1967).
490 | BOOK REVIEW
By focusing in the first chapter ‘Foundational intu-
itions and folk theory’ on Talbot and Daguerre, on
pictorialists and straight photography, or on Bazin
and Cavell, Costello does not aim at exhaustivity or
deep historical enquiry. But he points out how the-
oretical debates have been structured by noteworthy
stable distinctions or tensions that should be ques-
tioned anew. He shows how the statements by inven-
tors of photography like Nièpce, Daguerre or Talbot
put ‘emphasis on the “self-generated” aspect of pho-
tographic images’, and those of commentators stress
‘photography’s accuracy, speed and labour-saving
potential’ (11). These ideas pervade theoretical texts
until the twentieth-century. This also applies to the
assumption that photography is unable to transform
matter and express ideas, which was expressed by
Elisabeth Eastlake in one of the first sceptical claims
based on a distinction ‘between the manual and the
intellectual aspects of making art’.2 This very inability
is found in the following century in Bazin and in Roger
Scruton. Costello details debates between pictorialists
and straight photography by focusing on the way the
stakeholders insist on greater or lesser control exer-
cised by the photographer on the various stages of the
image-rendering process. In doing so, he reminds us
that the question of the photographer’s agency is not
new: ‘By insisting on the degree of control that even
pure photography permits, [Frederick H.] Evans is
responding to a prevailing worry about the possibility
of photographic art, and at the same time anticipating
twentieth-century debates’ (23). Costello also notes
how the opposition between the medium’s purity
and intervention by human hands is articulated in
Robert Demachy’s work: ‘This is Demachy’s reason-
ing: if the photograph is to be pure, the photographer
must refrain from intervention. But if the photogra-
pher refrains from intervention there can be no sub-
jective expression, and where there is no subjective
expression there can be no art’ (23). Costello asks,
however, directly after: ‘Is it inconceivable that one
2
Lady Elisabeth Eastlake, ‘Photography’, in Alan Trachtenberg
(ed.), Classic Essays on Photography (New Haven, CT: Leete’s Island
Books, 1989).
could demonstrate one’s artistry in how one respects
the photographic process?’ and this question is still
relevant today if one adds to it an inquiry about the
meaning of the term ‘intervention’ (23).
Chapters  2 and 3 consider Roger Scruton and
Kendall Walton. Both belong to what Costello calls
‘Orthodoxy’ but in its sceptical version for the
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former (Scruton claims that photography cannot be
a representational art) and in its non-sceptical ver-
sion for the latter (Walton does not deny the possi-
bility for photography to be a representational art).
These chapters also deal with responses to Scruton
and Walton, in particular the emergence of what
Costello calls ‘New Theory’. Like Scruton, Gregory
Currie contrasts photography with painting. The
classical distinction between traces and testimonies
introduced by Currie (together with the opposition
between ‘what a photograph is of’ and ‘what a pho-
tograph is about’ or the difference between ‘to rep-
resent by origin’ or ‘to represent by use’) does not
really reduce the tension between the epistemic and
the aesthetic dimension of photography.3 Admittedly
Currie argues that a photograph can represent a fic-
tion, but, notes Costello, it will not be by strictly
photographic means. As Costello puts it: ‘Only dem-
onstrating that photographs can be fictionally compe-
tent at the first-order level, by strictly photographic
means, would secure its fictional competence in the
eyes of committed sceptic like Scruton’ (74). This is
exactly the role envisaged by the New Theory which
is rooted in Patrick Maynard’s attempt ‘to redirect
philosopher’s attention from the photographic prod-
uct to the process underlying that product’ (7). New
Theorists aim to enrich the meaning of what we call
‘strictly photographic means’, which, in orthodox
views, is relatively poor and abstract. The first result
that one can credit the New Theory with consists
in the distinction between the light recording and
the photographic image. Costello highlights Dawn
Wilson’s (née Phillips) contribution to the New
3
Gregory Currie, ‘Visible Traces: Documentary and the Contents
of Photographs’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 57 (1999),
285–297.

Theory: a photograph is understood as a visual image
produced by a multi-stage process. The first stage is
a light image; the second is a ‘photographic event’
where the light image is recorded by a photosensitive
surface. The resultant record must undergo a further
process to become a visible image: a photograph. It
is important not to confuse the light image with the
photograph because ‘unlike a light image, a photo-
graph does not remain counterfactually dependent
on the scene it depicts’. So ‘the “ideal photograph”,
on which Scruton’s argument pivots, turns out to be
an idealisation of the light image rather than the pho-
tograph proper, and Scruton’s argument hangs on
conflating a way-stage in the photographic process
with its finished product’ (79). Another advantage
of defining a photograph through multiple stages,
with a distinction between the photographic event
and the production of images, is that it unties the
link between what is causal or natural in the proc-
ess and what is mechanical. Photography does have
an irreducible causal or natural aspect, since there
is a light image and a recording event. But the pro-
cesses implied in image production need not be
strictly mechanical and the photographer’s agency is
freed from the requirement of mechanicity. This lat-
ter point is to be found especially in Dominic Lopes’
account which ‘does not require that photography
be belief-independent, or counterposed to a class of
belief-dependent hand-made images’ (88). Costello
makes a valuable contribution to the New Theory in
chapters 2 and 3 when he introduces a gap between
Scruton and Walton. Scruton’s scepticism has been
the easier target for the New Theory to promulgate
its main results (such as the distinction between the
light image and the photographic image or the impor-
tance of the multi-stage process for the defence of
the artistic potential of photography). But Walton is
a far more formidable opponent since he is not scepti-
cal about photographic art and since he does account
for the difference between the epistemic and artistic
capacities of photography. At this point in his book
Costello really gets involved by using two arguments
against Walton. First, he explains that:
BOOK REVIEW | 491
perhaps Walton equivocates between photo­
graphs and photographic apparatus. As
two-dimensional surfaces in which we see three-
dimensional scenes, the former are a kind of
picture; as series of lenses and mirrors through
which we see the world, the latter are a type of
visual prosthesis. Cameras are not unlike peri-
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scopes and telescopes, with the added function-
ality of being able to record the images that they
provide. The claim that we see through cameras
and other lens systems is uncontroversial; the
claim that we see through photographs is not. …
That photographic apparatuses, such as cameras,
are aids to vision need not entail that their prod-
ucts also are. (113–114)
The second argument is based on an example of two
photographs by Lee Friedlander entitled Stems 1 and
Stems 2 (1999), which show, close up, stems of tulips
in a transparent vase full of water that is placed on
a table. Costello calls the mind-independence thesis
into question by building on a distinction between
non-occluded and out-of-focus details: when the
depth of field is adjusted to a minimum, a detail can
remain out-of-focus even if it is visible to the naked
eye and what is out-of-focus cannot appear in the
photograph independently of the photographer’s
mind: ‘unless the photographer notices the differ-
ence and intends to record it, by adjusting his camera
settings accordingly, it will not show up in the final
image’ (120).
Eventually, the strengths and weaknesses of
Orthodoxy and New Theory are placed in balanced
opposition: ‘if the old theory explained photography’s
epistemic capacities, but fell down with respect to its
artistic uses, the challenge for the new is to provide
an alternative explanation of photography’s epistemic
capabilities’ (7). Concerning this last point, which
is linked to the opposition between photography
and painting that is often assumed by folk theories
and Orthodoxy, Costello follows Lopes’ proposal
to ‘abandon the tendency to align the distinction
between belief-independent and belief-dependent
features tracking with that between photography and
492 | BOOK REVIEW
manugraphy altogether’  (124). This is a rather rad-
ical thesis which the book does not fully prove, but
which helps us to distinguish between photographic
practices or uses and the essence of the photographic
image:
Lopes’ goal is to show that knowledge-oriented
practices, widespread though they may be, do
not exhaust photography in general, and so
should cease to dominate our thinking about
it; conversely, aesthetically oriented practices,
widespread though they may be, are not coex-
tensive with manugraphy per se, so should cease
to dominate our thinking about hand-rendered
images. (134)
In sum, Costello warns us against the use of ‘a nar-
row diet of examples that misrepresents the scope of
the domain’  (126). We eventually understand why it
is so important to read the nineteenth-century texts
again. It allows us to discover that most of the theo-
retical claims about photography are a mixture of folk
intuitions and claims that have been ventured by users
(scientists, painters, architects, explorers), inventors,
and commentators, that is to say by people who, one
way or the other, have conflated some particular photo-
graphic practice with photography per se. Costello has
written an inspiring and useful book to anyone inter-
ested in moving forward and escaping the opposition
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between epistemic and aesthetic dimensions of pho-
tography, without neglecting these very dimensions.
One can only regret that he does not develop more new
arguments that could contribute to the New Theory,
but it would certainly have diverted him from his essen-
tial goal: writing a brief, synthetic and very clear book
about the way philosophers should try to answer the
question ‘What is photography?’ in a way that is sensi-
tive to history, art history and artistic practices.
Laure Blanc-Benon
Sorbonne Université
laure.blanc-benon@paris-sorbonne.fr
doi:10.1093/aesthj/ayy014