Toiwa Sethogwe © Dominick Tyler, from Exiles from the Kalahari
In my final year studying philosophy at UCL I tried to convince my tutor, the brilliant philosopher Jonathan Wolff, that I could combine my growing love of photography with my studies by submitting a photographic dissertation, that is a dissertation in the form of photographs. I failed to convince him, not because he wasn't open to the idea of photography having philosophical value, but because I couldn't really explain what it would look like and what it would communicate. It was an interesting discussion though and I often think if I'd been more diligent in my philosophical studies I would have been able to find some way to look at both disciplines through the frame of the other.
There are, of course, diverse writings on the philosophy of photography from Sontag to Barthes, some of which I've battled through but my ability to read philosophical texts in general has suffered from years of attention span contraction. How wonderful then to find "Philosophy Bites" a blog that presents interviews with leading philosophers as podcasts. A recent addition to the growing library is Cynthia Freeland on Portraits. Cynthia Freeland is Professor and Chair of philosophy at the University of Houston and has written extensively on art theory and aesthetics, her latest book "Portraits and Persons" is particularly concerned with what makes a picture a portrait.
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