Do We See People Through Photographs?

When looking at an old photograph, we naturally say, ‘I can see my father when he was young.’ Strictly speaking, only an image on paper or a screen is before us. Are we seeing merely the photograph, or also the person in it?

In 1984, Kendall Walton advanced the thesis of photographic ‘transparency’. Unlike a hand-drawn portrait, a photograph requires a real causal chain connecting the camera with its subject: light from the subject helps form the image. Just as we see something through a mirror or telescope, Walton argues, we can see an object through a photograph, although across space or time. ‘Transparent’ does not mean that photography lacks a medium. It means that the medium connects visual experience to an actual object in a distinctive causal way.

Critics reply that photographs remain products of framing, exposure, selection and processing. The person shown may no longer exist. If seeing requires an object to be directly present now, a photograph plainly falls short. More importantly, causal contact does not guarantee truth. Cropping can conceal the setting, an angle can mislead, and digital editing can alter the content.

My judgement is that the ordinary expression ‘seeing someone through a photograph’ is legitimate, but names a limited kind of seeing. A photograph gives us perceptual contact with a visual trace left by its subject. That differs from pure imagination and usually from a drawn likeness, yet it does not bring the subject back into our presence. We see how the subject once entered the camera, but not necessarily the whole of what happened. Photography's causal connection explains its special evidential force; the selectivity of the medium explains why that force is never absolute.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/depiction/
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/film/
https://doi.org/10.1086/448287