Elucidations Episode 86: Daniel Smyth discusses photographs and their vicissitudes
Aug 18, 2016
Daniel Smyth, a philosophy postdoc at Cornell who studies photography and visual representation, joins to explore why photos feel like evidence. He contrasts detection versus depiction, explains slit 'photo finish' cameras, and traces photographic conventions from optics to Hubble colorization. Short, thought-provoking takes on how background knowledge and cultural fluency shape what images mean.
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Photographs Require Background Knowledge To Be Evidence
- Photographs aren't intrinsically more evidential than paintings; their evidentiary power depends on background knowledge about how they were made.
- Closed-circuit footage gains credibility because entrenched media conventions and understanding of its production support its testimony.
Detecting Versus Depicting In Photos
- Distinguish what a photograph detects (causal light record) from what it depicts (interpretable scene).
- Our interpretation relies on background beliefs about creation, so depiction can diverge from detection.
Photo Finish Spatializes Time
- Photo finish cameras build the image line by line through a slit, so every vertical line is the finish line rather than a snapshot of space.
- The result spatializes time: left-to-right maps later moments, not different locations.