by Remmon Barbaza, PhD.
Fig. 1. Reading materials for class. Photograph by Remmon Barbaza
“Finally,” I told my class on the first day of a new course I just launched this semester, “finally, after many years of thinking about it, this course is now official—Philosophy of Photography.”
I wasn’t sure what to make of the faces of my students as I looked at them after saying that. Maybe they weren’t sure themselves what to make of this course, or what to expect from it, or why they were there in the first place.
“So, tell me, why are you here? What is it that you’re looking for?” I asked my class.
“Sir, this is a required elective course for us. Next year we’ll have another one, most likely environmental ethics,” said one my students.
“Ah! Just when I thought you are all here out of desire, out of genuine interest! But you’re here after all because you were required to take this course. How disappointing!” I said in reply, jokingly for sure, and the class laughed.
After the class, one of my students approached me, his face half disbelieving and half curious, and asked me, “So, sir, why, why indeed? Why were you thinking of this course for many years now?”
Fig. 2. Class details of Philosophy of Photography PHILO 127.09. The announcement was made last year, July 2022. Classes have started this August 2023.
It was late in the day, and we were all tired, so we had neither time nor energy to stay behind and engage in further philosophical discussion. I just found myself saying that there’s just so much going on in photography that deserves a serious philosophical inquiry, so much in photography that makes us think about what it means for anything to be, including what it means for us human beings to be.
On our second meeting, we had more time and energy to talk about what we might be up to in going through this course in the Philosophy of Photography.
I began by saying that the title of the course has the formula, “Philosophy of X,” where X can be anything. I told them I’ve taught Philosophy of Technology, Philosophy of the City, and once even Philosophy of Death. Come to think of it, philosophers can teach about the Philosophy of Anything!
I teased them: Doesn’t this then make philosophy the biggest scam of all? If we can talk about anything, then perhaps we are not really talking about anything! By that I mean that all other disciplines have clear boundaries (at least relatively speaking). We have an idea what physicists are working on, as opposed to chemists or biologists, as opposed to political scientists or sociologists or archaeologists, engineers or artists, or what have you. But philosophers? Who knows what they are doing, let alone thinking! Maybe not even God knows.
So, I told them, before we even try to get some clarity about what this course, Philosophy of Photography, is about, let us first talk about what philosophy is, or what we think it is. After all, this is not a course in photography—we’re not here to learn how to take photographs, although if my students so wished we can do a bit of it. Rather, we are here to philosophize about photography, as the unique human activity that it is, of both production and consumption, but also as an experience, as the world-forming event that it is.
When I asked them what they thought philosophy is about, nearly all of them said something that also applied to other disciplines—endless desire to know, incessant questioning, the will to know and understand everything, and the like. I told them that for as long as what they think philosophy is or what it does, also applies to other disciplines, then they haven’t quite gotten close to understanding what philosophy is, or what it means to do philosophy.
To begin with, when discussing the nature of philosophy, famous philosophers themselves would offer the most diverse answers, as if they were talking about different things.
Fig. 3-6. I think of Heraclitus, also known as “Hos Skoteinos,” or The Obscure One mainly because of his fragments that speak of hiddenness, unconcealment, and of mortality. Photographs by Remmon Barbaza
This gives us a clue—unlike “other disciplines,” philosophy doesn’t begin from a set of concepts or assumptions that are agreed upon or simply assumed by its practitioners, as Jaspers said in his introductory essay on the nature of philosophy. It does not begin from a set of premises. Perhaps we can even say it does not have any premises, at least none that can be taken as a starting point. Philosophy takes nothing for granted, and as such it can question anything, including itself. Of course, other disciplines ask questions, too, but philosophy asks questions in a radically different way, which includes the very act of questioning and the very ones themselves who ask questions.
In philosophy nothing is simply assumed, nothing taken for granted.
So, what then might we expect from this course, Philosophy of Photography? We can perhaps begin by disabusing ourselves of the unquestioned assumption that photography is pretty straightforward, that we already know what it is about, that we can just instead go ahead and go about our ways doing what we’ve been doing when we engage in photography, or simply use a camera, or look at photographs day in and day out.
What if for a moment we set that assumption aside, and at least entertain the possibility that we might be completely mistaken about what it means when we either take photographs, or look at them? What if we were looking wrongly, or looking at the wrong thing, what if we were thinking wrongly, or thinking of the wrong thing, when we engage in some form of photography, whether as consumers or producers?
What if—just what if—there is something of profound importance when someone like Roland Barthes makes the rather surprising claim that if we are to seriously discuss photography, we have to do so from the perspective of death? Just what does death have to do with photography?
I thought of beginning the course with thinkers from Greek antiquity, notably Heraclitus, mainly because of his fragments that speak of hiddenness, unconcealment, and of mortality. If to engage in photography is to engage in the act of revealing—since every photograph tells a story, and in telling a story, reveals something—if to photograph is to reveal something, then we might as well listen to the thinker who thought precisely of unconcealment, of the play between hiddenness and revealing. “The hidden attunement is better than the obvious one,” we hear from one of the fragments of the ancient thinker.
Heraclitus was also known as “Hos Skoteinos,” or The Obscure One. “He is ‘the obscure one’,” says Heidegger, “because he thinks questioningly into the revealing.”
It is perhaps no coincidence that I was somehow led to begin the course with the fragments of Heraclitus, the Obscure One, for a course in the philosophy of photography, recalling (and only in hindsight) at the same time that the ancestor of the photographic camera is called camera obscura, or dark chamber, which goes back to antiquity.
Photography came to be through darkness, through obscurity.
Even setting photography aside, beings reveal themselves each time, every moment, before us. Such a revealing, we learn from the Obscure One, takes place in and is made possible by hiddenness, by concealment. If something is revealed—unconcealed—it is because it is, first of all, safeguarded by hiddenness, by concealment. And what is concealed, what is hidden, “is better than the obvious one.”
Fig. 8. Different philosophers would offer the most diverse answers on the nature of things. Talking about photography would not be that different. Photographs by Remmon Barbaza
But we don’t want to think or talk about such things. They are so far removed from the business of photography as we think unconcealment is from any consideration of truth. But the ancient thinkers experienced what we now call “truth” as unconcealment, as alētheia. Truth, primordially understood, is not primarily about verification of propositions, but rather the opening of one’s being to the event of unconcealment.
We’d rather talk about the highest resolutions that modern cameras are capable of, the fastest sensors, the sharpest optics, and the most intelligent of photographic programs, without for a moment considering the unfolding of beings right before our eyes. “Having eyes, we do not see.”
The observation made by the Obscure One more than two thousand years ago still holds today: We, we who are so sure about what we do when we engage in photography are “oblivious of what we do awake, just as we are forgetful of what we do asleep . . . Not comprehending, we hear like the deaf, the saying is our witness: absent while present.”
Moments pass by, as beings unfold right before our eyes, and before we know it, we are about to die.
Would that as we take a photograph, or behold one, would that we get struck so hard and so deep by light—the light that we say that we write when we photograph (literally, to draw or write with light)—that we be granted the vision to see whatever shows itself before us, until it is time for us to be brought back to the darkness where we came from, and from where the coming-to-light takes place.
Let no one get in the way of this eternal play between darkness and light, between concealment and unconcealment, between hiddenness and revealing.
“Quick,” bids us the Obscure One, “corpses should be thrown out quicker than dung.”
- Remmon E. Barbaza
Department of Philosophy
Ateneo de Manila University
17 August 2023
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