Transparency, Pictures, Perception

Kendall Walton has (in)famously argued that photographs fundamentally differ from handmade pictures such as paintings and drawings in a crucial respect: unlike the latter, photographs are transparent in that looking at them allows one to literally see the objects they depict. Walton’s explanation for this alleged contrast appeals to the different ways in which the depictive content of a photograph and that of a handmade picture counterfactually depend on the depicted scene, and to the similarity between the dependence profiles of photographs and experiences of seeing an object. I argue that, even if photographs are indeed transparent and handmade pictures are not, it is a mistake to think that what grounds the transparency of the former and the non-transparency of the latter concerns the counterfactual dependence profiles of these different pictorial kinds. The dissimilarity between the dependence profiles of photographs and handmade pictures stems from some merely accidental features of certain types of cameras. Further, the dependence profiles of photography and ordinary object-seeing are not at all analogous in the way Walton supposes. Thus, even those who are convinced by photographic transparency need an alternative account of it.