On the epistemic value of photographs

The photograph is the only picture that can truly distinct from that photograph-namely, its convey information, even if it is technically faulty depictum.6 For Walton, photographs are of a and the object can barely be identified. A painting of kind with mirrors, telescopes, and microscopes: a murder is of no interest whatever; but a photograph they are prosthetic devices that enable us to see of a murder fascinates everyone. things that we could not see without them.7 Gerhard Richterl Whereas these other prostheses help us to see things around corners, very distant things, and Many have held that photographs give us a very small things, photographs enable us to see firmer epistemic connection to the world than things that are spatiotemporally remote.8 Walton do other depictive representations.2 To take just emphasizes that he means this proposal quite one example, Bazin famously claimed that literally: "[t]he objective nature of photography confers on it a quality of credibility absent from all I must warn against watering down this suggestion, other picture-making."3 Unfortunately, while against taking it to be a colorful, or exaggerated, or the intuition in question is widely shared, it has not quite literal way of making a relatively mundane remained poorly understood. In this paper we point. I am not saying that the person looking at the propose to explain the special epistemic status of dusty photographs has the impression of seeing his photographs. We take as our starting place (in ancestors-in fact, he doesn't have the impression of Section I) Kendall Walton's startling proposal seeing them "in the flesh," with the unaided eye. I am that photographs are special because they are not saying that photography supplements vision by "transparent" -that is, that they are special helping us to discover things we can't discover by because, unlike other depictive representations, seeing.... Nor is my point that what we see-photothey enable us literally to see their depicta.5 graphs-are duplicates or doubles or reproductions Walton' s proposal has not convinced many; of objects, or substitutes or surrogates for them. My however, it has proven surprisingly difficult to claim is that we see, quite literally, our dead relatives say just what is wrong about the transparency themselves when we look at photographs of them.9 thesis. In Sections II through IV we shall rise to this challenge and show why photographs are Why does Walton insist that photographs are not transparent in Walton' s sense. Finally, in transparent? He believes that there are significant Sections V through VII we shall propose and similarities between the way that photographs defend a novel diagnosis of what is epistemiprovide visual experiences and the way that cally special about photographs. ordinary vision provides visual experiences. For one, photographic images are counterfactually dependent on the scenes they represent; for I. TRANSPARENCY AND PHOTOGRAPHS example, had your ancestor been smiling rather than frowning, the photograph of her would In saying that photographs are transparent, have looked different. For another, and unlike Walton means that visually attending to a photorealistic paintings and drawings (where such graph enables us to see something numerically counterfactual dependency may hold), this