Dr Claire Anscomb, who recently completed a PhD in History and Philosophy of Art, has written a piece for Uppsala University’s Aesthetic Perception and Cognition Project entitled ‘Photographic Phenomenology in the Digital Age’.
The essay is part of the project’s ‘A Beautiful Summer‘ series. Throughout July and August, invited contributors submit short essays which form the starting point for reflection and debate in a series of weekly online discussion seminars on central topics in philosophical aesthetics.
Claire’s piece, due to be discussed on Wednesday 15 July 2020 at 3pm BST, explores digitally manipulated photographs.
‘Post-photographic theorists feared that the epistemic standing of photography would wane with the advent of digital post-processing (Mitchell 1998; Richin 2010; Savedoff 2008)’, Claire writes. ‘Evidence suggests however, that despite the knowledge that digital photographs can be easily and convincingly manipulated (although not always – just search ‘Photoshop fails;), viewers continue to subsume the contents of photographs as veridical’.
The full piece can be read on the Aesthetic Perception and Cognition project’s website, here:
https://aestheticperceptioncognition.se/ideas/photographic-phenomenology/
The registration link for the online discussion of Claire’s essay can be found here:
https://aestheticperceptioncognition.se/events/summer2020/