Real Likenesses. Representation in Paintings, Photographs and Novels, by Michael Morris

Abstract

The view developed in this book is that when looking at a representational painting we see a 'real likeness': something that is worked in paint, that really exists, that resembles what is depicted, and that, in virtue of that resemblance, counts as the same kind of thing as what is depicted. This Real Likeness view is applied not only to representation in painting, but also representation in photography and in novels. For each of these three art forms, the Real Likeness view is presented as the best solution to a problem. A constraint on any plausible solution to that problem is 'the Non-Distraction Thesis':(ND) Attending to the medium of a representational work cannot inevitably be a distraction from attending to its content, or vice versa. (P. 21.)In this review, I present and discuss the problem, (ND) and the real likeness view in three consecutive sections. My focus will be Morris's discussion of paintings, which constitutes the first part of the book and which is used when applying the view to photography and novels.Morris makes an interesting and significant contribution with his book, I think. However, presenting his view as standing alone in opposition to the 'dominant' views of depiction, photography and literary fiction is, in my opinion, to exaggerate its novelty. The view has some (albeit perhaps not 'dominant') siblings in the literature on depiction and photography, where Aasen (2015), Briscoe (2016), Martin (2012), Nanay (2018) and Wiesing (2009), like Morris, identify something which is seen in a picture or a photograph, is additional to it and what it represents, and plays a vital representational role. Some issues in the philosophy of perception, attention and language, are also clearly relevant but not engaged with. While I mainly have to bypass these issues, I will towards the end of this review compare Morris's view to its siblings in the depiction literature and try to identify something that I believe stands out about it.