Looking at some of the iconic images that we recognize as such (we don’t seem to have a definition of iconic images) one might want to think that for a person to be in a particular iconic image is for her or him to be a moral witness (following Margalit’s definition thereof). But is that…

It is an instructive exercise to compare so-called iconic images (as in: photographs) to paintings that have become an icon. A clear example of the latter would be Picasso’s Guernica, of the former: Vietnam Napalm, photograph by Nick Ut, 1972. Iconic Photographs A photographer does not make an iconic image. She makes photographs and one…

Claude Lanzmann argued (a.o.) that the Shoah cannot be represented (photographically, I would want to add). He states this clearly in explaining what he would do had he found documentary footage. Now if something cannot be represented, then surely it can be misrepresented. (Rather, every representation of it would be a misrepresentation.) This leads to…

In “Jongleren met de werkelijkheid” stelt Hans den Hartog Jager een interessant fenomeen aan de orde. Hij noemt het een taboe, en misschien is het dat ook wel. Het gaat erom dat veel schilders naar foto’s werken, maar dat ze hun werken slechts zelden vergezellen van de foto’s waarnaar ze gemaakt zijn. Het doet mij…

A natural sense of melancholia overcomes one easily when watching historical documentary footage. The people one watches are all but dead and gone. Their lives, however miserable or joyful, held some kind of inner coherence, much like one’s own live does—which too will become a thing of the past in the not so far future….

Photographs used to be proof of the reality of their subject: what was on them proved to have existed. [Roland Barthes wrote an interesting booklet about this]. This evidential capacity distinguished photographs from their intentional counterparts, paintings. [Roger Scruton (1983) wrote a convincing article on this distinction.] Due to digitalization all this has changed thoroughly,…

1. All sorts of them. Let me sum up some types of discrepancies between originals and their copies. Some of these should tell us something about our concepts of ‘art’, ‘the authentic’, ‘forgery’, ‘representation’, and ‘reproduction’. A scene and its photographic representation; A scene and its painted representation; A scene and its description; A painting…