Can a Photograph Be a Work of Art?

And what of our human art? Must we not say that, in building, it produces an actual house, and in painting, it produces a house of a different sort, as it were a man-made dream for waking eyes?- Plato “A photograph is never interesting for its own sake, as art must be…,” was the claim of conservative writer and philosopher Roger Scruton in his controversial 1989 paper ‘But is it art?’ Many responded strongly to Scruton’s claim that a photograph, unlike a painting, can never be representational, in any aesthetically pertinent sense of the word. He argues that there is an “intentional” relationship between a painted representation and its subject; an intentional relationship which simply cannot exist between a photograph and its subject as, according to Scruton, photographs, by the mechanical nature of their creation, cannot express thoughts. An artist’s painting of a person represents the artist’s thoughts about that person, “a thought embodied in perceptual form.” It is Scruton’s belief that a photograph is nothing more than a simple recreation of that person’s appearance. Painted representations are inherently intentional, they express thoughts. Given that photographs are created in a mechanical fashion, says Scruton, they cannot express thoughts and photography therefore cannot be a representational art. “Literature and painting represent things, not by copying them, but by expressing thoughts about them…” (Scruton) In another of his papers on the same theme, ‘Photography and Representation,’ Scruton argues that the only way in which we can be interested in a photograph is if that photograph acts as a kind of replacement for the thing it represents, whereas a painting can transcend the subject and have aesthetic interest, not for what it depicts, but for what it represents. “If one finds a photograph beautiful, it is because one finds something beautiful in its subject. A painting may be beautiful, on the other hand, even when the subject is an