A Critique of Pure Photography

In his letter of 7th July 1688 to John Locke, William Molyneux posed the following problem:

“Suppose a man born blind, and now adult, and taught by his touch to distinguish between a cube and a sphere of the same metal, and nighly of the same bigness, so as to tell, when he felt one and the other, which is the cube, which the sphere. Suppose then the cube and sphere placed on a table, and the blind man to be made to see; quaere, Whether by his sight, before he touched them, he could now distinguish and tell which is the globe, which the cube?”

The Molyneux Problem exposed the divide between the empiricists, who contended that the mind is incapable of creating a representation from the different senses, and therefore could not convert the haptic into the optic, and the rationalists, who reasoned that the mind is capable of matching the tactile to the visual. The empiricists’ position was that we have no innate knowledge; comprehension can only arise from sensory experience. Rationalists, such as René Descartes, argued that “perception, or the action by which we perceive, is not a vision but is solely an inspection by the mind.” Accordingly, John Locke and his fellow empiricists concluded that the formerly blind man would not be able to identify the objects.

In 1728, the surgeon William Cheselden successfully removed the cataracts of Daniel Dolins, a man who had been functionally blind since birth. Testing Molyneux’s Problem on him, Cheselden found that Dolins “knew not the shape of anything, nor any one thing from another”, seemingly proving the empiricists’ case. However, the validity of Cheselden’s experiment is doubtful; Dolins’ vision was still in the early stages of recovery, and it never improved sufficiently for him to be able to read. In 2007, when the Molyneux Problem was tested on Indian cataract patients who were blind from birth, initially only half could visually recognise the objects they had just handled, but a week later the patients’ success rate was much greater. While this proves that the brain does develop an ability to make connections between the senses, strictly speaking it validated the empiricists’ argument, as the brain requires time to adapt. Molyneux’s criterion – the ability for the blind person to immediately see clearly – is medically impossible, so his question was ultimately philosophical. A hundred years after Molyneux’s letter to Locke, the debate between the empiricists and the rationalists resulted in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.

Applied to photography, Molyneux’s Problem accentuates one of the dilemmas photography faces to this day, particularly within the context of contemporary art. Acute visual scrutiny and robust intellectual analysis have not necessarily proceeded hand in hand, despite one being at a loss without the other. (Although some photography is ostensibly and explicitly employed as a reference rather than an image in itself; it is the latter under consideration here.) According to modernist principles, art should be self-reflexive of its medium, with painting emphasising the “flatness” of the canvas by abandoning the illusion of three dimensionality. Conversely, photography’s properties challenge the appearance of the flat because it is created via a monocular projection with its inherent depiction of perspective. Moreover, photography was able to develop from the rudimentary shallow-focus flat image into a more detailed and nuanced rendition of depth through technical advancements in film and lenses, which enabled greater focus and depth of field. Stretching the focus from the foreground backwards to expand the depth of field creates a “sculptural realism” that resists the confines of the flat.

Concentrating on a photograph’s definition and depth can emphasise modernist principles over postmodernist ones, and such a dichotomy can polarise its reception. Any sensory or aesthetic approach amounts to only a partial engagement if unaccompanied by political or cultural considerations; likewise, to overlook its modernist qualities by downplaying the visual undermines the medium’s potential. Consciousness of both invites a multi-layered engagement and critical plurality. With its indexical realism, political and cultural reflexivity, its capacity for synaesthesia and scope for engendering mnemonic and intellectual responses, photography rewards close observation. By reversing the conditions set out in the Molyneux Problem, the optical triggers the haptic, and given that photography’s abstracted realism is no more or less than a projection through a particular lens and angle, it demonstrably throws into question the nature and meaning of that depicted reality. Going beyond the flat by forensically exploring the picture, sensing the light and colours, feeling shape and material, and from that engagement, eliciting speculation - these are photography’s pathways that open up in the depths of the picture.