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All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others.

George Orwell (1903-1950)

Photos as representations of society

For Wittgenstein, a picture represents what it depicts. Often it also expresses what we cannot say in words. If we can, maybe we need a long essay to describe what the picture captures in one image. As a photographer it’s obvious that I agree with this view and therefore it is not strange that once I got the idea to illustrate these blogs with photos. At first I did it only now and then, but now you find a photo of mine at the top of each blog. Sometimes I pick one from my archives and sometimes I take one especially for a blog. However, it happens also the other way round: I have taken a photo, for instance because I like the scenery that I captured with the photo, and afterwards I give it a wider – philosophical or sociological – interpretation and write a blog about it.
Take for instance the photo at the top of this blog. To my mind, it’s not only an interesting picture, but it says also much about our society and how we interact with each other. But let me first tell a bit about what made me take it.
Once on a trip to Paris I took a photo of Les Halls (once the old fresh food market, now a shopping centre; click here for the photo.) It’s a picture of a square in the shopping centre. In the middle you see a man with a notebook or something like that. Around him, people are passing by. What makes this photo special is that the people around the man look like shadows or ghosts. This effect was brought about by using a long shutter speed, when taking the photo. I had done so only because it was quite dark then. However, when I saw the result, it appealed so much to me that I wanted to take more photos like this one. It was just because of the artistic expression, not because they had a special philosophical or sociological meaning for me.
It proved very difficult to find places where I could take such photos, so places with the right people (one person stationary plus some persons moving) and the right light conditions. In the 30 years since I took the Paris photo, I succeeded to take only a few like that. One is the photo here at the top of this blog, taken in a shopping mall in Helsinki, some 15 years ago. At first, I found the result a bit disappointing, for wasn’t there too much movement in the photo? However, when I looked at it again after a while, my view had changed, for it was precisely this strong blur of the moving people passing by, as distinct from the still figures who were in focus – a man and a woman with a pram – that seemed to me to enhance the effect even more. Just this contrast turned out not only to produce a photographically appealing image, but also to give the photo a meaning that goes beyond the purely photographic image. In fact it is the core of the philosophical or sociological expression of the photo, not in the sense that it places this photo in a certain philosophical or sociological frame, for example because it is the photo of a certain type of photographer or because such photos are characteristic of a certain era or society, because many people took such photos then or there. No, the photo is, as it were, a theory about man himself.
On the one hand, when people act, they do it in a certain social environment that functions as the background of their actions. It is the space in which they act. However, this social environment is not merely background. The acting people are not separate from it. By their actions people also make their own social environment. The social environment is background and product of their actions at the same time. But what is the relationship with the social environment, with the people around us, worth when it really comes down to it? In this respect, this photo shows a pessimistic view. The man in the photo is doing something with the pram. Does he need help? No one seems to care. In this sense, the photo gives a certain pessimistic, if not negative, picture of society, indeed: in the end, we must rely on ourselves. Or is this too pessimistic? For there is also another person who obviously is involved. Is it the partner of the man behind the pram? The photo doesn't make it clear. What is clear is that we see one or two individuals socially isolated from the environment. From this point of view, and if this interpretation is right, the photo is an expression of our present highly individualistic society.
But maybe all this is a too pessimistic view on society. On the one hand people often altruistically help each other if they see others in need – see the present flood disaster in Europe – but on the other hand, how often isn’t it so that people think only of themselves and don’t care about others when they should. – see the corona crisis – However, that’s another discussion. What I want to show here is that photos often are not simply beautiful pictures, art for art’s sake, a manner to show to others what you did during your holiday, and so on. Photos can also – and I think they do so most of the time, if not always – have a wider philosophical and/or sociological meaning. They say something about who we are and how we live. A photo is a picture of reality; it is a model of the reality as we think it is.

Random quote
The word, like a god or a daemon, confronts man not as a creation of his own, but as something existent and significant in its own right, as an objective reality.

Ernst Cassirer (1874-1945)

To say and to show. Wittgenstein and photography (2)

In my last blog we have seen that photography was important for Wittgenstein, not only because he himself was an enthusiast photographer, but also because he often referred to photos in his work, especially in his Philosophical Investigations (PI). Apparently, the basis for his “photographic view” on philosophy was laid in the 1920s by his photographic experiments, but we find already elements of this view in the preceding years. So, in a letter to Russell in 1919 Wittgenstein called the distinction between to say and to show the “main problem of philosophy”, and actually he stressed the significance of this distinction already in his Tractatus logico-philosophicus. From here the move from showing in general to showing with a photo is easily made, if you have become interested in photography.
In the Tractatus philosophizing is talking, saying, in the first place. There philosophy is logical analysis, so analysis in words. It is talking about thinking, and language is the totality of our thoughts. For example, Wittgenstein says in the Tractatus:
4. The thought is the significant proposition.
4.001 The totality of propositions is the language.
4.0031 All philosophy is “Critique of language” …
But what if you cannot express things in words? What if you have no words for what you want to say? What if there are no words for what you want to say? Wittgenstein gives the answer in the famous last sentence of the Tractatus:
7. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.
In the German original we read “Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen”, and maybe this statement could be better translated as:
7’. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one needs to be silent.
Or in other words, one has no choice but to be silent.
That is what Wittgenstein said in the Tractatus. But in this work we find already the seeds of one of the main points of his Philosophical Investigations, namely the importance of the picture, the image, and so also of the photo, which is expressed in his famous words “Don’t think, but look!” (PI, 66) For we read already elsewhere in the Tractatus:
2.172 The picture, however, cannot represent its form of representation; it shows it forth. (italics mine)
4.1212 What can be shown cannot be said.
Here, implicitly, the importance of showing is presented as an alternative to saying, although this idea is not yet developed in the Tractatus. Rather it is there ignored, if not rejected (cf. 7 above). Note, by the way, that in 4.1212 Wittgenstein sees saying and showing not as supplements to each other but as alternatives. This changes in the PI (which I’ll not demonstrate in this blog, but see what I said in my blog last week about the importance of photos and photography in the PI). But if, as in the PI, showing comes of equal standing to saying, then it is no longer true what Wittgenstein says in Tractatus 5.6, namely
5.6 The limits of my language mean the limits of my world,
for now my world comprises also what can be represented in pictures, in images. Once we see this, the importance of photography becomes clear, for photography is one way – and currently one of the most important ways – to make images of the world. In a photo we show instead of say, and often we show with a photo what we cannot say. 

Related literature
|- Franz Hoegl, “Sagen, Zeigen, Beobachten.Eine philosophisch-systemtheoretische Betrachtung,” (click here)
- Wilhelm Vossenkuhl, “Sagen und Zeigen. Wittgensteins Hauptproblem” (click here, chapter 2)

Random quote
Every people must face the truth that in the space it calls its property and to which it is attached, it is a relatively recent and, moreover, contingent appearance.

Ton Lemaire (1941-) 

Wittgenstein and photography

We regard the photograph, the picture on our wall, as the object itself (the man, landscape, and so on) depicted there. This need not have been so. We could easily imagine people who did not have this relation to such pictures. Who, for example, would be repelled by photographs, because a face without colour and even perhaps a face reduced in scale struck them as inhuman. (Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, xi). 

Everybody knows Ludwig Wittgenstein as a philosopher. What is less known is that he had also a great interest in photography. Not only are there many references to photography in his work, like in the quote above, he himself was also an enthusiast photographer. In the mid-1920s, Wittgenstein did some photographic experiments with the help of his friend Moritz Nahr, a court photographer. One of these experiments was making a composite photo of three photos of his sisters and one of himself. This photo is said to be the start of the development of his ideas of language game and family resemblance. In the 1930s he made his own photo album. Now, in these days that everybody has a camera, albeit maybe only the one in the smartphone, this would not be worth to notice, but in Wittgenstein’s days not many people did. Then taking photos was something for the elite and for hobbyists, so it says something about the person Wittgenstein was. In 2011 photos by Wittgenstein have been exhibited by the Wittgenstein Archives in Cambridge, England, and from next November till March 2022 there’ll be such an exhibition in the Leopold Museum in Vienna on occasion of the 70th anniversary of his death.
Wittgenstein had an idea of what a photo represents and means that was yet rather unusual in his days. Then the mainstream idea was that a photo is an objective picture of reality. Generally, a photo that had not been taken according to strict technical rules, and was blurred, with a sloping horizon, too large a foreground, etc., was looked down upon as amateurish, even though there were already photographers who just used such “mistakes” as creative expression. Just in Wittgenstein’s time a new generation of photographers was coming that didn’t care about such rules. Already in his photo experiments we see that Wittgenstein had also a wider view on what a photo could be. Moreover, he didn’t think that a photo was an objective depiction of reality. A photo is a kind of “probability”. It is a mere snapshot. You don’t know what happened before and after it had been taken. If you would know it, the original meaning you had given to a photo might completely change. I can illustrate this best with a portrait: Someone poses for a portrait, but maybe s/he is acting and plays someone else. The real person is different, but can you see in the photo who s/he is? Knowing the before and after of the photo can give you a different view on the image. As Michael Nedo, keeper of the Wittgenstein Archives in Cambridge explains: “A photograph is a frozen moment, outside time. As Wittgenstein says it is ‘a probability’, not ‘all probabilities’, what one sees in the blink of an eye. But if you keep your eyes open you will see things move and change, nature as a dynamic event, and it is this constant changing that creates fuzziness on one hand but clarity on the other, because if you only glimpse then you exclude all other aspects, you have no greater clarity, you are blinkered.”
As we see in the quotation at the top of this blog a photo can, and is, also subjective in another way. Even if we agree what a certain photo is about, not everybody needs to see it in the same way. In Wittgenstein’s days photography was black-and-white photography. This gives him the idea that for one person a photo can be a good portrait and for another it is rather a caricature just because it lacks colour. But even if a photo, or in this case, a portrait, is in colour, it can bring different interpretations. For one a portrait of, say, Stalin, can arouse happy feelings because he sees in him the man that saved the Soviet Union during the Second World War. In another person the portrait can arise disgust because s/he sees in Stalin the man who murdered many innocent persons. In the same way non-portraits can lead to many different interpretations. As Wittgenstein implicitly said in the quote: A photo doesn’t depict an object but an idea, a view.
To end this blog, yet another quote from the Philosophical Investigations, although from a different context: “Don’t think, but look!” (66) Doesn’t this say more about Wittgenstein view on photography then any words? What you can’t say, you must show. 

Sources
- Josh Jones, „The Photography of Ludwig Wittgenstein”, https://www.openculture.com/2012/11/photography_of_ludwig_wittgenstein.html
- Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, https://docs.google.com/file/d/0Bw-duXxYihdvWVlFaUhzclY5Vmc/view?
esourcekey=0-yM43SGwy4WylmIhjksh2BA
- “Wittgenstein on Photography”, http://leicaphilia.com/tag/wittgenstein-and-photography/
- “Wittgenstein’s Camera”, https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/wittgenstein%E2%80%99s-camera

Random quote
The putting men to the rack is a dangerous invention, and seems to be rather a trial of patience than of truth.

Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592)

Celebrate the Dutch Landscape

IJssel River near De Steeg, Netherlands. This is one of the photos I exhibit in

the Naarden Photo Festival (see link under "Sources" below; till 29 August 2021).

The way we look at the world around us says much about who we are. Therefore it is not without meaning that it was only in the 14th century that in Europe artists started to paint landscapes. At first landscapes were backgrounds of portraits, but gradually landscapes as such became the main theme. At the end of the 15th century the landscape had become a genre of its own in the western art of painting. At the same time also man and society began to change. The God-centred closed society of the Middle Ages gradually opened itself to the world. Traditional man discovered that things could be different from what it had been for them. Man began to travel and became an explorer and discoverer or a travelling scholar. Rich young people made “grand tours” for their education. Romantics made walks in nature or went to other countries to see different ways of life. People began to travel out of curiosity or just in order to see what there is behind the horizon, or they simply wanted to be away from home. Tourism developed. A new man was born.
In a way, landscapes had always existed before they were painted, of course, and without a doubt some people always have enjoyed them; have enjoyed being there and walking or riding in nature. However, landscapes were not a subject of art and reflection till the end of the Middle Ages. With the expansion of the traditional world there came room for a new look on the space around man: The space seen as landscape.
As such a landscape is not any view or representation of this view (painting or photo) on the man surrounding space, whatever it is. It’s true, generally speaking we can – and often do – call a view of the wild Rocky Mountains or icy Antarctica a landscape, but when we look at the way painters and later also photographers represented the idea, a landscape is usually something different: It is something between the wild untouched nature and the completely man-made environment, the town. In this sense a landscape is a mixture of nature and culture. Actually in all landscape paintings both aspects are present. A landscape painting is meant to represent space and nature but it’s actually never so that we see only wild nature in a landscape painting. There are always elements that refer to man, to human presence. We see a farmhouse, or a cabin, or the shadows of a town in the background; a (usually lonely) man or woman strolling along a muddy road. A landscape is nature and culture in one.
What also seldom is absent in a landscape painting is the horizon, explicitly or implicitly. A horizon symbolizes space, but it indicates also that the world is wider than what you see depicted. In this sense a horizon is also desire. It closes the view but there is always something behind it that we cannot see but actually want to see. It is a limit we want to overcome (although when we try, it moves further and further away, showing that there is no limit to our desires).
This idea of landscape is quite romantic, maybe too romantic. It supposes that there is something like nature in the space represented in the image. Just those painters that have become famous for their landscape pictures, the Dutch masters of the 17th century, in fact depicted fully man-made sceneries, although they suggest a meeting between man and nature. Almost each meadow, each ditch or river, each other element there has been made or shaped by man. Already since ages there is no real nature anymore in the Netherlands. It’s not without reason that there is a Dutch saying that “God made the world and the Dutch made the Netherlands”. And isn’t this so also for large parts of Europe, certainly around cities and bigger villages?
If this was already the case in the 17th century, it is the more so in this day and age in the 21th century. In most of Europe and I dare say on every square cm of the Netherlands nature does no longer exist. Everything there is man-made, everything is culture. Even so-called nature reserves are, and all “wild” birds and animals there actually are zoo animals. But when cities penetrate the countryside, as they increasingly do since the 19th century; when townspeople buy and build houses in the countryside; when the countryside urbanizes, what remains then of the idea of landscape? Or must we give it another meaning?
A few days before I published this blog, in Naarden in the Netherlands the biennial Photo Festival has been opened. A special project of this festival is “Celebrate the Dutch Landscape”. What makes this project so special and valuable, thanks to curator Kenneth Stamp, is that you see there not only landscapes in the traditional sense of the 17th century, but that it discusses the idea of landscape as such: Is the traditional idea of landscape still valid these days that “nature” has become man-made? What has changed in the landscape outside the towns? Must we not look for the landscape also within the towns? Aren’t towns types of landscapes as well? Is there still room for the horizon? Must we regret these changes? In the photo festival these questions are discussed for the Dutch landscape but they are important for everybody who is interested in the idea of landscape.

Sources
- Ton Lemaire, Filosofie van het landschap. Bilthoven: Ambo, 1970.
- Naarden Photo Festival, especially the subpage on the special project Celebrate the Dutch Landscape.

Random quote
Who wants to write an unreadable book must describe life exactly as it is.

Theo de Boer (1932-)