Episode 86: Daniel Smyth discusses photographs and their vicissitudes
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Why do photographs carry evidential weight while paintings do not?
Hey, Matt Techman here from Elucidations. Before we get going today, I just thought I'd ask if you're a fan of the show, to maybe go to our iTunes page and leave a rating and a review, and that way more people can discover it. Alright, thanks.
Hello and welcome to Elucidations, a philosophy podcast recorded at the University of Chicago. I'm Matt Tykman. And with me today is Daniel Smith, postdoctoral fellow in philosophy at Cornell University, and he is here to talk about photographs and their vicissitudes. Daniel Smith, welcome. Hi Matt, thanks for having me. So photographs play an interesting role in our lives. They play the role often of evidence of things. So for example, if I'm accused of robbing a bank and somebody produces a photograph of me pointing a gun at a bank teller and asking for money. That's considered to be at least some evidence that maybe I robbed the bank. Whereas, if somebody produced Like an oil painting of me pointing a gun at a bank teller, that would not be considered evidence that I was robbing a bank.
What do you think explains this difference? Why is a photograph considered to be evidence for something taking place, but like drawings and paintings and maybe some other kinds of images aren't?
That's a really great but also very natural question to ask. Um So one of the things that I start to think about when I start worrying about these things is the wide variety of photographs that really don't just play an important role in our lives, as you said, but really pervade our lives. So A photo from a closed circuit camera of you pointing a gun at a bank teller does provide a certain degree of evidence of your nefarious activities, but the images in, say, a politician's commercial as he or she runs for president do. don't necessarily have the same documentary or evidentiary status. And so one of the things I'm interested in is what's the difference between those two photographic in instances.
You mention a an oil painting of you robbing the bank. And it's true that that oil painting is only as good evidence as The painter who painted it is a good witness to the to the transaction. So you believe the painting as much as you believe the painter, given that she is skillful in depicting what really happened. Whereas the photograph seems like a reason for believing witnesses who also claim that you robbed the bank. It's not just that they provide you a reason for believing the image. It's the reverse. The image provides you with a reason for believing them when they say you were the one who held up the bank on first and seventh. But there are a lot of photographic images or photodependent media where we don't have that same intuition, where the fact that something is depicted in an image doesn't give us the same reason to believe that it happened.
I mean, commercial movies provide a host of examples of this. Nobody has ever destroyed the Death Star, but many of us saw it happen on screen and on film. So one of the things that I think really enters into the explanation of why we believe the closed circuit video footage or why we accorded a a degree of credence that we don't accord the oil painting has to do with understanding how those images came to be made. And I'm not sure that there's anything intrinsic to A photographically dependent way of producing an image that lends an especially high degree of credence to the image that results.
So the Death Star example is interesting. It's interesting in particular because it's a visual effect and visual effects I think are interpreted by film viewers maybe a bit differently from just ordinary shots of like a person in a room. But maybe to like take a different example from the same movie Maybe we would think that a shot of Han Solo in a spaceship is maybe it's not evidence that there was a person named Han Solo in a spaceship, but in a way it's is an evid it it does uh sort of document or provide evidence that there was a person named Harrison Ford. And for example you can see the scar on his chin. So there was this person and he had a scar on his chin and so on and so forth.
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