ABSTRACT
All around us in our homes, in the streets, in the pages of countless magazines and books we find an endless procession of photographic images. When John Locke, the father of empiricism, said in 1690 that the mind was a blank slate on which experience writes he gave us the philosophical metaphor for the photograph. Photography is the champion of empiricism: the view that the objects in the world are the only source of knowledge. This chapter begins with an examination of the way in which the medium of photography imposes particular kinds of restraints on the photographer and how, through skilful choices, these limitations have been transcended. It examines how these choices affect the epistemological status of photographs. Photographs tend to imply a metaphor of transparency; they suggest by their very closeness to nature that they are a window into a part of the world.
