Pyke - Philosophers

Photographs by
STEVE PYKE

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ISBN-13: 9780199757145

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STEVE PYKES GALLERY OF MINDS

Arthur C. Danto
2010

Steve Pyke, master photographer of the soul and character of individuals of diverse classes and callings, encountered his first philosopher in 1988, when he received an editorial commission to portray Sir Alfred Jules Ayer, author of Language, Truth and Logic, a popular classic of analytical thought. Though warned that he had but ten minutes to capture Ayers likeness, the session stretched into several hours of talk of a kind and order of openness that nothing in Pykes experience had prepared him for. Freddie, as Ayer was affectionately called, professed a philosophyLogical Positivism or Logical Empiricismthat is often considered tight, dry, closed, cold, narrow, barren, and juiceless. It consigns to the bin of mere nonsense the sublime visions that have inspired multitudes. But based on my own experience, whatever Ayers official limits on the topic of metaphysics, there must have been so much thought, wit, practical wisdom, wide knowledge and stunning clarity in his everyday conversation that Pyke, who had seen life, knew the world, and was already an artist of considerable achievement, had never before met its like. He had not read much if any philosophy. But such, I surmise, was the range, depth, and charm of Ayers discourse that it sufficed to open Pyke up to philosophers as a species, and to embark on a project of photographing not just philosophers, but philosophers philosophersthe men and women whose philosophical achievement was respected by other philosophers. The result is a unique study of what roughly 200 practitioners, mainly of the analytical school of professional philosophers, actually look like to the Pyke-eye, to use the artists e-mail designation. It is a thrilling examination of the physiognomy of thought.

Professor Sir Alfred Ayer, 1988

Most of what analytical philosophers talked about among themselves was language, but the particular social group to which Ayer belonged was also characterized by a sparkling urbanity that was unique, in my experience at least, and what Pyke was exposed to in his meeting with Ayer was a kind of salon discourse that may have had a counterpart in Paris, but nowhere in America, so far as I know. Ayer belonged to a subset of British philosophers that were distinguished by a broad cosmopolitanism, and an inbred sophistication that enabled them to move at ease in and out of political, financial, and artistic, as well as academic circles. His peers were, among others, Isaiah Berlin, Richard Wollheim, Stuart Hampshire, Bernard Williams, Iris Murdoch, David Pears, and Philippa Foot. Theirs was not just a world of language, truth, and logic, but of theater, art exhibitions, and gossip. Their world was one readers of Evelyn Waugh or Anthony Powell would be familiar with. Their talk would not be typical of the way philosophers talk elsewhere, and for all I know, the social world of Bloomsbury, Chelsea, and South Kensington has now vanished.

But there is a philosophical form of life defined by a certain kind of talk, writing, and thought, in which all philosophers must be fluent but in which some philosophers excel. It requires a facility in argument and an ability to invent examples and particularly to produce and know how to neutralize counter-examples. In truth, one can experience philosophy in practice by reading the dialogues of Plato, in which Socrates, who is not known to have written anything, explores with sundry Athenianssoldiers, business men, poets, teachers, and otherslanguage, truth, and logic, to be sure, but also beauty, knowledge, virtue, justice, courage, love, appearance, reality, and how to live a meaningful life. Those are still central philosophical topics, and what the Greeks said to one another remains a living presence in philosophy seminars in Frankfurt, Paris, Oxford, both Cambridge England and Cambridge Massachusetts, and wherever else philosophy has a life. The philosophy of all those pictured here, whether they are living or dead, remains part of what philosophy is, was, and will be. Perusers of this book will not hear their voices, but will be able to see, to the degree that it is possible, the way they talked, thought, and wrote, which etched the disposition of their features. For the most part, Pyke shows us only their heads, in characteristic moments of thought, which some of them look as if they are about to express.

Everybody looks fiercely smart, though we have testimony regarding the great thinkers of the past that they didnt always look as clever as they actually were. Most readers of the Scottish seer, David Hume, would give him the highest marks in acuity and inferential daring, but his looks were another matter altogether. A young lordling, under Humes charge on the Grand Tour, wrote that Nature, I believe, never yet formed any man more unlike his real character than David Hume His face was broad and fat, his mouth wide, and without any other expression than that of imbecility, his eyes, vacant and spiritless, and the corpulence of his whole body was far better fitted to communicate the ideal of a turtle-eating Alderman, than of a refined Philosopher. We may confirm this by consulting the 1766 portrait of Hume by Allen Ramsay, though the art historian, Edgar Wind, writes that the heavy mass of fat is articulated and touched with meaning the mouth, beautifully arched, expresses a mixture of sensuality, melancholy, and wit; the forehead is broad and the eyes calm and clear. This may help explain Humes attractiveness to women that somewhat baffled his contemporaries. And it is a useful example of how to read a portrait, especially in looking at a book like this. Still, Ramseys 1766 painting of Hume was an official portrait, for which Hume wore the formal dress of an Embassy Secretary. He would have looked very different sitting in his library, chattering in his famous brogue.

My own sense is that the human face and the camera, as it has evolved, were made for one another. The face is in constant movement, and in the course of its ceaseless modulation transmits, almost cinematically, a series of disclosures of its owners inner being. The shutter is made to capture this, by admitting lightnatures pencil, as Fox Talbot, coinventor of photography, called itwhich instantly draws the emitted soul on a light-sensitive surface. Because of its constant motion, the face is typically between looks, which is why photographers often ask the subject to smile, as a way of freezing the features in an acceptable look, or something like an acceptable look. Most such smiles are unnatural, and the face becomes a mask. The great photographer is not interested in masks, because they tell us almost nothing about the subjects soul. He or she stalks the soul and is gifted with the reflexes that open the lens just when the face opens, and the soul makes a flashing appearance. The hands of the painter are never fast enough to do this. Hume, alas, was portrayed in the dark age of pre-photography. Photographers who ask for smiles are modeling themselves on painters.