Fixing the image : re-thinking the 'mind-independence' of photographs

It has been argued that photographs are unsuitable or inferior candidates for art because they are not intimately bound to the mind of an artist. I believe that we can address scepticism in the philosophy of art only if we recognise that it is linked to dogmatism in the epistemology of photography. This is the motivation for the present article. I argue that the epistemic debate is dogmatic when mind-independence is treated as a defining feature of photographs. I argue for a better understanding of the photographic process, and show how with this mind-independence need not be a defining feature of photographs