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)