What the photographer who’s taken philosopher portraits thinks of philosophers
aestheticsforbirds.com
aestheticsforbirds.com
I have a degree in analytic philosophy, and this is definitely true. It's something I both miss and think is a serious issue with the field of philosophy, at least in the Anglosphere. It's very, very tempting to stay in the isolated, intellectual world of academic philosophy, where rigor matters and the petty sociopolitical problems of the world outside can be safely ignored. The vast majority of analytic philosophy doesn't really comment on contemporary ethical issues in the first place, which is ultimately where that buffer comes from, instead focusing largely on language, logic, and similar areas.
But it also leaves you feeling like you aren't really engaging with the world and with everything that the field of philosophy has to offer, especially when contemporary times are IMO full of real-world problems in desperate need of philosophers.
Reminds me of the Adler quote;
What binds the authors together in an intellectual community is the great conversation in which they are engaged. In the works that come later in the sequence of years, we find authors listening to what their predecessors have had to say about this idea or that, this topic or that. They not only harken to the thought of their predecessors, they also respond to it by commenting on it in a variety of ways.I guess the camera is »just« a tool to the photographer. If their job requires certain things that can be done more efficiently with digital photography (e.g. sports – there was an article here recently about how photography was done at the olympics), then I'm fairly certain they tend to choose the better option.
However, for more artistic things like his portraits, I guess it makes little difference. Probably similar to a carpenter who just likes working with hand tools instead of power tools. Personally I like my SLR camera and dread going to mirrorless eventually (or I have to upgrade as long as DSLRs still exist) – at the current point I still feel weird about looking at a screen and not directly through the lens. I also like having all the settings and knobs to turn to control the exposure.
And all that is more a preference thing because it's a hobby for me that's fun and I am not bound to any particular results or cadence thereof.
There's a series on YouTube, Pro photographer, cheap camera. I was impressed at how usable photos can still come out of essentially trash cameras. But perhaps that's what a professional photographer's skill is: Taking a tool, considering what it can do (and what it cannot) and planning the shot accordingly
It isn't a professional photographer's skill, though, but a photographer's one. Anyone who tells you he's a photographer and can't talk intelligently about these tradeoffs, about the selection of constraints to fit the intent of the work and vice versa, he's lying to impress you and probably don't let him hand you a drink.
Surely that is what photographers always have been? A photographer in the sense of the article is an artist. The image is created by the photographer using the tools of his trade, the camera, the film, the dark room. Now a photographer uses scanners, digital cameras, and software but I don't see that the essence of artistic photography has changed.
What would Knight call a portrait painter?
The artist does appear to use a large aperture (or some other technique) to control depth of field. So there are portraits where the background is blurred, or in some, even parts of the subject (hands vs face). But, overall, they're mostly all in focus.
It is amazing how little of our field of view is in focus. Hold up your hand at arms length and look at your thumbnail so it is in focus. Notice that the part of the thumb immediately below the thumbnail is out of focus unless you move your eyes to look at it.