Posts Tagged ‘philosophers’
“What could be more simple and more complex, more obvious and more profound than a portrait?”*…
Philosopher Alex King talks with Steve Pyke, a renown photographer of philosophers…
Steve Pyke is a renowned portrait photographer. He has published ten books, including the award-winning I Could Read the Sky (with Timothy O’Grady). He has photographed politicians, astronauts, film directors, artists, laborers, and—in two collected volumes—philosophers. He was the staff photographer at The New Yorker for several years and, in 2004, was appointed an MBE. His work has been exhibited worldwide and is held in many permanent collections, including the National Portrait Gallery and the V&A Museum. See more at his website, Pyke-Eye…
… SP: I’ve made two series of portraits of philosophers. The first series was during the late ’80s and ’90s and contained about eighty people, and the second continued through the ’90s until 2008 and contained a hundred more.
The first series came about after Sir A.J. Ayer suggested I do it. The series had a big impact because it outed what philosophers actually looked like. Remember, when I photographed the philosophers the first time around, there was no internet. There was no way of knowing what a philosopher looked like unless they were pictured on a book jacket. I think Quine had a picture that was photographed in the forties! They were not that image-conscious a bunch. Not then.
I met the most amazing people—people like Jack Rawls and David Lewis. When I met Freddie Ayer, he was an 88- or 90-year-old man. He was very much seen as the face of philosophy after Bertrand Russell.
But I wasn’t able to speak their language, the language of philosophy. I don’t come from that world and in a lot of ways it’s not what interested me in the philosophy world. Even though I didn’t speak to Ayer about Language, Truth, and Logic, we had common ground. We’d both been part of the same time, and that narrative of our time was the common language. That and football—he was a Spurs supporter!
AK: How did you pick which philosophers to photograph?
SP: I don’t pick them at all. They pick themselves. Whenever I’d photograph a philosopher, I would ask them, “Who are ten people alive that have had an influence on your work that I should photograph?” And whenever the name came up three times, was mentioned by three philosophers, that’s when I contacted that person. It wasn’t easy to find them, either. At that time, I employed a researcher who tracked them down. Their job was to find someone like Martha Nussbaum, to literally call around and ask where I could find her…
Nobody had really photographed philosophers before as a series. This was the first time anyone had put together a survey of pictures of philosophers as a collection. No one knew what they looked like, and it seemed like there was little interest in knowing that, even amongst themselves. Admittedly there had been some interviews. Bryan Magee did a really famous set of interviews in the seventies, which had some pictures. Some of them were published in a very interesting book. But I started to realize the photographs were really of an unrecorded tribe…
… When I decided to do a second series, I was working in New York. One of the first people suggested to me, and the first portrait I did for that series, was Anthony Appiah. That was emblematic of the most notable difference. The first series had a very noticeable imbalance in gender, age, and race. Most were older white men. But the second time around was more diverse. Many of the philosophers were also younger, certainly closer in age to me, and we shared more cultural and social references. So we could sit around, talk, and drink… we used to party.
People like Delia Graff [Fara], Jason Stanley, David Chalmers, Stalnaker, Kripke, and Stephen Neale. Whoever would come to town, we’d hang out. I became very good friends with a number of people in the philosophy community.
Saul Kripke made a habit of coming to my photography shows. I had a private viewing of my Pictures of the Dead. It was pretty weird to have Saul Kripke come to things like that, but there he was.
The experience photographing the second series was much more social than the first series had been…
… AK: It’s so interesting to hear you talk about this. You have an outsider’s perspective on what philosophy culture is like, on what philosophers look like and what we are like, how we comport ourselves and how we interact with each other. And you see how we change over time. It reminds me of families. People who see their children all the time tend not to notice how much they’ve changed because it only happens incrementally. But people who see, say, their young cousins only once every few years are often shocked at how much they’ve grown and changed. I think we philosophers are a bit like the parents in this case—changes often happen very gradually, so we don’t notice them unless we take a step back. Doing these series puts you in something more like the cousin’s position, one where you can see immediately how dramatic the differences are.
The analogy you make to family is nice. It really is a family, the family of philosophers. And as with any family, there’s a lot of infighting. Maybe more than most families, because for you there are real philosophical points to be making.
When I made the first series, one of the things I was most amazed by was how intolerant philosophers seemed. I realized that this happened because their time was precious, and to have spent time with this “child,” their philosophy, to have nurtured it and brought it through, to have written a paper, had it accepted and published, and then to have somebody deny what they thought…
… AK: You don’t think that’s true in the Arts?
SP: Not in the same way. In the arts, a lot of the judging is outside of your tribe: curators, galleries, even museums. Philosophers are judged more from within. Also, much of philosophy is not for public consumption, or at least, it sort of is but sort of isn’t. You’re ultimately making things for your own family and they’re the ones judging you. The Arts function in a different way…
More of the interview (shooting “philosophical couples,” technique, plans for a third series): “What the Photographer Who’s Taken Hundreds of Philosopher Portraits Really Thinks of Philosophers,” in @ArtFlockTweets.
More of Pyke’s portraits on his site: “Philosophers, Vol 1” and “Philosophers, Vol 2.”
* Charles Baudelaire
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As we ponder portraits of those who ponder, readers in New York City might note that today is their final opportunity to see “Unseen Work,” a collection of early photographs from the remarkable street photographer Vivian Maier, on display at Fotografiska. From the show’s description:
Born in New York in 1926, Vivian Maier spent her early years in the Bronx. Throughout her time in New York City, Maier began to photograph the world around her and develop a visual language through the use of her camera, all while working as a nanny. Nearly a century later, Maier figures in the history of photography alongside the greatest masters of the twentieth century…
… Unseen Work explores Maier’s complete oeuvre from the early 1950s to the mid-1980s through approximately 200 works: vintage and modern prints, color, black and white, and Super 8 films and soundtracks, offering a complete vision of the dense, rich and complex architecture of this archive that provides a fascinating testimony to post-war America and the hell of the American dream…
More of Maier’s work here.
“All philosophy lies in two words, sustain and abstain”*…
To Epictetus’ dictum in the title of this post, one might add “disdain”…
“That most deformed concept-cripple of all time.”
– Friedrich Nietzsche on Immanuel Kant
“Hegel, installed from above, by the powers that be, as the certified Great Philosopher, was a flat-headed, insipid, nauseating, illiterate charlatan who reached the pinnacle of audacity in scribbling together and dishing up the craziest mystifying nonsense.”
– Arthur Schopenhauer on Georg Hegel
“There’s no ‘theory’ in any of this stuff, not in the sense of theory that anyone is familiar with in the sciences or any other serious field. Try to find… some principles from which you can deduce conclusions, empirically testable propositions where it all goes beyond the level of something you can explain in five minutes to a 12-year-old. See if you can find that when the fancy words are decoded. I can’t. So I’m not interested in that kind of posturing. Žižek is an extreme example of it. I don’t see anything to what he’s saying.”
– Noam Chomsky on Slavoj Žižek
“Well, with all deep respect that I do have for Chomsky, my… point is that Chomsky, who always emphasizes how one has to be empirical, accurate… well, I don’t think I know a guy who was so often empirically wrong.”
– Slavoj Žižek on Noam Chomsky
“Russell’s books should be bound in two colors, those dealing with mathematical logic in red – and all students of philosophy should read them; those dealing with ethics and politics in blue – and no one should be allowed to read them.”
– Ludwig Wittgenstein on Bertrand Russell
The hits just keep on coming at “The 30 Harshest Philosopher-on-Philosopher Insults in History” and “Philosophers’ Insults.”
Special bonuses: Monty Python’s “Philosophers’ Football” and “Dead Philosophers in Heaven.”
* Epictetus
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As we live the examined life, we might send porcelain brithday greetings to Marcel Duchamp; he was born on this date in 1887. A painter, sculptor, and conceptual artist, Duchamp was, with Picasso and Matisse, one the defining figures in the revolution that redefined the plastic arts in the early Twentieth Century– in Duchamp’s case, as an early Cubist (the star of the famous 1913 New York Armory Show), as the originator of ready-mades, and as a father of Dada.
In the 1930s, Duchamp turned from the production of art to his other great passion, chess. He became a competitive player; then, as he reached the limits of his ability, a chess writer. Duchamp’s Samuel Beckett, an friend of Duchamp, used Duchamp’s thinking about chess strategy as the narrative device for the 1957 play of the same name, Endgame. In 1968, Duchamp played an on-stage chess match with avant-garde composer, friend, and regular chess opponent John Cage, at a concert entitled Reunion, in which the music was produced by a series of photoelectric cells underneath the chessboard, triggered when pieces were moved in game play.
Duchamp (center; his wife Teeny, right) “performing” Reunion with John Cage (left) in 1968
Stocking Stuffers for the Sagacious…
In the same spirit as the afore-featured Literary Action Figures, and just in time for the Holidays, The Unemployed Philosophers Guild (“The unexamined gift is not worth giving”) offers finger puppets of the world’s greatest philosophers, authors, artists, leaders, and thinkers…
Mark Twain
Immanuel Kant
Virginia Woolf
Mahatma Gandhi
Marie Curie
Louis Armstrong
Find these and 100 more, from Hannah Arendt and the Buddha to Ulysses S. Grant and Zora Neale Hurston, at The Unemployed Philosophers Guild.
[TotH to Brain Pickings]
As we muse on the money we’ll save on manicures, we might send poignantly amusing birthday wishes to Emmett Kelly, the best-known circus clown of the Twentieth Century; he was born on this date in 1898.
Kelly began his career under the big top in the early 1920s as a trapeze artist; but in 1931, he switched to clowning. In a move that was revolutionary at the time, Kelly eschewed traditional white-face, darkening his face to become “Weary Willie,” a character based on the hobos of the time. While he did do gags (famously, “opening” a peanut with a sledgehammer), his act was largely mimed sketches in which his bedraggled character is yet again out of luck. (Perhaps his best-known bit derived from his regular appearance after other acts, sweeping up: toward the end of the show he tries– and of course fails– to sweep up the pool of light cast by a spotlight.)
Kelly worked at a number of different circuses through the 20s and 30s until he settled, in 1942, at Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey. He performed there (with a short break to play “Willie” in Cecil B. DeMille’s The Greatest Show on Earth in 1952) until 1956, when he served a year as the mascot of the Brooklyn Dodgers. He was an inaugural inductee into the International Clown Hall of Fame and into the International Circus Hall of Fame. And though he was born in Sedan, Kansas, Kelly was inducted into the Hall of Famous Missourians; a bronze bust depicting him is on permanent display in the rotunda of the Missouri State Capitol.
Stop, Thief!…
A total of 23,748 bikes were reported stolen in London in its 2009-10 fiscal year– up 27.8 per cent from the previous year– though police believe that the true figure could be double that. Kevin Scott, a 21 year-old designer, has an answer: a new variety of folding bike…
Read the full story (and see more pix) at Daily Mail. (Readers who value fine design, but have tastes that are less experimental, might check out the rides at Public Bikes.)
As we search our closets for those pedal-pushers, we might bake a dome-shaped birthday cake for inventor, educator, author, philosopher, engineer and architect R(ichard) Buckminster Fuller; he was born on this date in 1895. “Bucky” most famously developed the geodesic dome, the only large dome that can be set directly on the ground as a complete structure, and the only practical kind of building that has no limiting dimensions (i.e., beyond which the structural strength must be insufficient); but he was sufficiently prolific to have held over 2000 patents.
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