This is made in philosophy bites with me David Edmonds and me Nigel Warburton.

Philosophy bites is available at www

philosophy bites.com.

Philosophy bites is made in association with the Institute of Philosophy.

Photography is part of most people's lives, but philosophers have rarely focused on it.

Kendall Walton of the University of Michigan is an exception.

He's a snapshot if he's approached to the subject.

Kendall Walton, welcome to Philosophy Bites.

Great to be here.

The topic we're going to focus on is photography.

I wonder if you could begin by saying... The topic we're going to focus on is photography.

I wonder if you could begin by saying what's distinctive about photography as opposed to other

kinds of pictures.

Okay, well there are a lot of typical differences between photographs and other kinds of pictures.

Let's concentrate on what I'll call casual snapshots.

You snap the picture in an old brownie camera and you send it to the drugstore and it comes back.

Those are the most distinctive kinds of photographs.

So anyway, you can usually tell with a picture whether it is a photograph or a painting or drawing.

Photographs typically have subtleties of shading

that are difficult to get in paintings and drawings

as well as gradations of light and dark and perspective is easy to do and so forth.

So these are various respects in which typically photographs differ from other kinds of pictures,

...