BU Humanists at Work: Daniel Star and the Public Humanities
When Associate Professor of Philosophy Daniel Star was a graduate student, he was not encouraged to write for a general readership. “Public facing writing by academics was frowned upon as not a serious thing,” he explains. Traditionally, academics in the humanities ascend the ranks within their institution and garner recognition in their field by producing scholarship to be read by fellow specialists. Given this existing framework, it can be challenging for humanists to learn to share their expertise with the general public. Nevertheless, in his article “The truth of photographs,” recently published in the online magazine Aeon, Star skillfully draws on research for his monograph The Ethics of Photography, which he is presently writing with an eye to the non-specialist reader.
While there is a relatively large body of literature on ethics in photojournalism, where the purpose of photographs is primarily to document events, Star explains that there is little published research on the ethics of art photography, especially in philosophy. The Ethics of Photography (which is under contract with Oxford University Press) will fill this gap by inviting readers to consider the ethical issues that arise when photos are taken and produced for primarily artistic purposes.
Star has a personal stake in these issues. As a highly skilled non-professional photographer, his consideration of ethical issues in art photography bridges theory and practice. Take, for example, this portrait he took that he discusses in “The truth of photographs.” This seemingly innocent photo, titled “Thinking and resting,” could potentially become the subject of several ethical debates.
Thinking and resting, by Daniel Star
Belonging to the genre of street photography, “Thinking and resting” is candid and was taken in a public space. As is usually the case with street photography, Star does not know the people in the photo, and he took the photo without their permission. Did he have the right to do that? How might the ethics surrounding his taking the photo have changed if the people in the photo were engaged in a different activity? What if Star had taken a photo of people engaged in an equally benign activity but in a private space (as is the case with the controversial photographer Arne Svenson, known for the candid photos of people doing mundane activities that he took through his neighbors’ windows)?
And as the maker of “Thinking and resting,” what responsibility does Star have to capture the essence of the photo’s subjects or to represent some truth about them? In “The truth of photographs,” Star challenges the commonly held belief that the photographer should aim to capture their subject’s essence. Instead, candid photos like “Thinking and resting” could serve as a foil. “Interpreting the image immediately above, one might think it is of a tired man with his legs up in the midst of thinking about something, while his loved one rests on his back,” writes Star. But without knowing the subject, how could Star really know for sure? “As for the essence or character of these subjects, and whether the poses in question are typical or atypical of them, we remain in the dark,” he continues.
For Star, this thinking extends beyond candid photographs. Even in a posed portrait, Star believes that the quest to capture essence is futile: “There isn’t some simple essence that you can capture in a photo . . . While I think there are truths about you, what your essence consists of is up for debate. It might not even be clear to you. We’re constantly changing,” says Star. For example, let’s say you photograph a friend who you think has a very distinctive smile. Maybe you take a photograph that captures her smile, but her smile, distinctive as it may be, doesn’t tell the viewer much about who she is as a person.
When a painter paints a portrait, it is generally accepted that their own subjectivity and artistic intentions will bear on how the subject is portrayed. Star believes that this same creative license should apply to art photography: “How other people see us and decide to portray us is going to involve creative interpretation. Within certain limits, we have to be okay with that . . . I’m not saying that the artist should be allowed to do anything, but I do think it makes a difference if you think about how important artistic projects are in people’s lives and how, as a society, we may want to protect artistic projects as well,” says Star. While it’s always possible that a subject may not like the way they appear in a photo, candid or not, it’s also possible that a person may discover some aspect of themselves in a photo that they hadn’t previously considered or that they only later come to identify with.
Readers will find these concepts explored in “The truth of photographs” sprinkled throughout The Ethics of Photography. While the book falls squarely within Star’s expertise in ethics and aesthetics, it will also dip a toe into humanistic fields in which he does not possess scholarly expertise, such as art history and cultural studies. In a particularly candid moment, Star shared some of the common anxieties that scholars feel when pursuing projects with an interdisciplinary component: “In writing this book, I’m being careful to do a lot of reading outside of my field. My greatest fear is that I’ll make some big mistake and someone who knows a lot about photography might pick up the book and say ‘how did you not think about this?’ or ‘why are you ignoring this?’ You have to be sensitive to those issues, but we all have gaps in our knowledge. The important thing is to try to learn more and get feedback from scholars in other fields.” For this reason, Star found it particularly valuable to present his work in progress in the AY 22-23 BUCH Fellows Seminar, composed of scholars that span humanistic disciplines.
Star was commissioned to write “The truth of photographs” when an editor at Aeon saw a social media post announcing his book contract for The Ethics of Photography. While Star was happy to accept the offer, adapting his ongoing work on The Ethics of Photography for a magazine article proved to be a challenging writing exercise. Despite — or perhaps because of — a word count that falls far short of most academic papers, Star admitted to spending a lot of time on “The truth of photographs,” including several exchanges with an Aeon editor. While he thoroughly enjoyed writing for a general audience, he acknowledged the difficulty of “finding a way for the piece to be philosophical without assuming that people have a background in philosophy.”
But for Star, it’s worth the effort. In contrast to what he was taught in graduate school, he sees public-facing philosophy as a valuable endeavor. Star believes that just as popular books by doctors and scientists play an important role in public education in medicine and science, public philosophy has the potential to expose the public to humanistic questions, concepts, and arguments that they may not have considered. And Star is quick to assert that public philosophy “doesn’t have to be worse philosophy. Maybe it doesn’t go at the same speed, but that doesn’t mean that the piece can’t be doing good philosophy,” he says. Noting the difficulty of explaining what philosophy is and what philosophers do, Star hopes that as philosophers provide more examples of philosophical work to the public, more people will come to see philosophy as a valuable and worthwhile pursuit.