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