This is philosophy bytes with me, David.
Edmonds, and me, Nigel Warburton.
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Photography is part of most people's lives, but philosophers have rarely focused on it.
Kendall Walton of the University of Michigan is an exception.
Here's a snapshot of his approach to the subject.
Kendall Walton, welcome to philosophy Bites.
Great to be here.
The topic we're going to focus on is photography.
I wonder if you could begin by saying what's distinctive about photography as opposed to other kinds of pictures?
Okay, well, there are a lot of typical differences between photographs and other kinds of pictures.
Let's concentrate on what I'll call casual snapshots.
You snap the picture in an old brownie camera and you send it to the drugstore and it comes back.
Those are the most distinctive kinds of photographs.
So anyway, you can usually tell with a picture whether it is a photograph or a painting or drawing.
Photographs typically have subtleties of shading that are difficult to get in paintings and drawings, as well as gradations of light and dark.
And perspective is easy to do and so forth.
So these are various respects in which typically photographs differ from other kinds of pictures, but they're not the most fundamental differences between photographs and other kinds of pictures.
So what are the fundamental differences?