ABSTRACT
Photographs are taken to provide a record, a document, a proof, an aid to memory, that something once happened, that someone looked like this, that somewhere people can encounter that. In other words a drawing is the product of the intentional activity of a person using a drawing medium, whereas a photograph is the causally explicable effect of light falling on a light-sensitive medium. There is also a famous photograph from the Russian Revolution of Lenin addressing a crowd from an improvised rostrum. In the original the photograph shows Trotsky standing close to Lenin. In the version of the photograph reproduced in Russia under Stalin and subsequently, Trotsky has disappeared from the photograph: he has been painted out, visually unpersoned. In an important essay, 'Photography and Representation', Roger Scruton ends a critique of photography as a possible artistic medium by declaring, 'The medium of photography, one might say, is inherently pornographic'.
