ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that Kendall Walton's negative and positive arguments pull in opposite directions and that, faced with a choice between them; his own methodological reflections suggest we should opt for the latter. For all Walton's efforts to defuse the transparency thesis's counter-intuitiveness, the majority of commentators continue to find the claim that we see through photographs unconvincing. Walton is in agreement with Patrick Maynard, for whom the interaction between photography's epistemic and aesthetic capacities is central: "'Photography' might be most simply characterized as the site of the most spectacular interaction of depictive and detective functions". Provision of egocentric information is regarded by many of Walton's critics as a condition that all genuine seeing must fulfil. Walton complains that when his critics object that it is counter-intuitive to say that we see through photographs, they are implicitly relying on a folk conception of seeing.
