Lucian Wester Trimester1-Draft

Outline essay

Question. In our daily life we relay on photographic images to give us information, to verify if the written accounts we read can be considered truthful. We want to see pictures to be sure that a story is real. Newspaper and other media supply us day in day out with photographical evidence of their truth. And so the question that I want to discuss is: why is photography considered to be objective? Why do we trust it and were lies its origin, was photography always considered to depict the world as it appears to us?

What. Objectivity and subjectivity. Let us first look at what objectivity implies. To start objective is closely linked to subjective and the one cant be described without the other, the two are each others opposites. Subjective is mostly described as expressions from someone mind or in other words the expressions of a subject. Subjective ideas and thoughts are tied to one subject in particular, although thoughts and opinions are shared between multiple subjects, the fact that the subject knows that there are different and even contrary thoughts makes him chouse one and therefore a subject. The subject must interpret, classify, change, make information his own, form his own opinion. Objective is mostly described as something outside of your self, something that is bigger than your self. The object does not have an idea of its own, its just simply there. And in a sense it is something that is shared between subjects; if there are ideas that are shared by a large number of subjects those ideas could be called objective. But in a lot of cases, as we shall see, the shared idea is not enough to call it objective, we need something outside ourselves that proofs that something is indeed objective.

Objectivity and Truth to nature. The difference between the two is that truth-to-nature for example depicts a flower in an atlas as one who stands for the whole while objectivity shows the variety of the hole. In other words the first is stylized the other isn’t. Truth-to-nature seeks to unravel the underling structures in the variety of forms in witch nature percents its self. To do so a scientist must be an expert in observation: “genius of observation” (objectivity p.58). In a sense the pictures created by these observation practises are more real than nature itself because they seek underlining structures. The scientists needed to see a lot of different specimens to render an archetype witch stands for the whole. There are two ideas in observation described: ‘The “ideal” image purports to render not merely the typical but the perfect, while the “characteristic” image locates the typical in an individual.’ (objectivity p.70). Within the “ideal” images the scientist seeks to combine truth and beauty to get the purest images therefore he needs artists. The scientist noticed that the interpretations that they made were sometimes the wrong ones and they were the ones to blame not nature itself. So the new goal was to: ‘Let nature speak for itself’ (objectivity p.120). The ‘willful intervention of the artist-author’ (objectivity p.121) has to be repressed by ‘a strict protocol, if not automatically.’ (objectivity p.121) the scientist must be self-regulated. In this banning out the subject of the scientific practice mechanical devices and machines where very helpful because they lack a free will to intervene. Photography is one of these mechanical devices that was used al lot by scientist because of it so called: ‘blind sight.’ (objectivity p.124). The blind sight that a photograph gives is a ‘judgment-free representation’ (objectivity p.139) and the scientist aimed to see like a photograph, whiteout judgment and to be like the machine. But images are always mediated and so a photograph is never free from intervention by a subject. The dream of the objective scientist to have images that are completely objective was never fulfilled: ‘Merely using photography could not cure the diseases of the will, a disorder that survives in the very construction of the German word willkürlich.’ (objectivity p.151) (willekeur – dutch or arbitrariness – English)

How. How photography became objective? In the year after photography was introduced in 1839 it was mostly used for making cheap portraitures of the middle class. In this sense photography was used as a substitute for art and there was no real distinction between art being more subjective and photography being objective. Photography was admired for producing extraordinary detail and likeness of the people it depicted. But is was not considered to be an objective view on the world.

Why Why did science shift from truth-to-nature to objectivity? The prologue describes how a physicist named Arthur Worthington studies the impact of a liquid drop on a flat service. In the beginning he makes drawings of his own perception but later he uses photography to catch the different stages of the impact. In compare, the drawings made by observation where much more stylized and in perfect symmetry than to the photographs that showed a more chaotic splash. After comparing the drawings to the photographs the scientist realised how much his own subject, his own prejudice was involved in making these drawings. (This change appears because of what is illustrated in the prologue: ‘their fear was that the subjective self was prone to prettify, idealize, and, in the worst case, regularize observations to fit theoretical expectations: to see what it hopes to see.’ (objectivity, p.34))

How did it change our subject? We became conscious of our own subjective and prejudice will to intervene with and interpretate information.