UPDATE, February 2025:
The seventh book to feature one of my photographs on the cover is now forthcoming from Oxford University Press.
Ofra Magidor and David Liebesman chose an image that reflects a central idea of their monograph, Property Versatility and Copredication, viz. that the very same properties can be instantiated in quite different ways, as when objects of different shades instantiate the same generic color, or when particular color properties are instantiated in both light sources and their reflections. The location was Hisarüstü metro station in Istanbul.
The seventh book to feature one of my photographs on the cover is now forthcoming from Oxford University Press.
Ofra Magidor and David Liebesman chose an image that reflects a central idea of their monograph, Property Versatility and Copredication, viz. that the very same properties can be instantiated in quite different ways, as when objects of different shades instantiate the same generic color, or when particular color properties are instantiated in both light sources and their reflections. The location was Hisarüstü metro station in Istanbul.
I update my photography website, Scrivadelly Photography, on an occasional basis. There I am continually experimenting with the curation process that has historically been a large part of what photography is all about. This process involves making careful choices regarding the sequencing and juxtaposition of photographs. My hope is that the viewer will explore the galleries on my website by looking not only at the individual photos, but also at how they are related to each other.
So far, seven of my photographs have appeared on professional book covers – three on my own books, and three on books by other authors or editors. If you are writing a book and think you might like to use one of my photos, drop me a line and we can discuss this possibility. Knowing Better was the first book to feature one such photo. The cover photo is one that I took when I was a graduate student in Oxford. I like the fact that unless people know the doors in Jericho that feature here (and even people who live in Oxford normally report not having seen them) they tend to guess the scene is from elsewhere. The doors might be said to represent the two approaches to moral knowledge that I discuss in the book.
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When it came to choosing a cover image for The Oxford Handbook of Reasons and Normativity, I felt somewhat torn between three possibilities. In the end, I went with a photo taken in New York of a green traffic light, a lamp, and some buildings in the background. As with a number of my other photos, I purposely created an image with an unusual and unrealistic perspective. The traffic light might be taken to allude to norms and reasons, and the light from the lamp might be taken to suggest the possibility of philosophical reflection casting light on the nature of such things. The second cover image I considered is a radical reworking of Richard Long’s Slate Oasis. Although this cover would have been particularly striking, we didn’t use it because we assumed that we would need to pay a large sum of money to the Turner prize winning sculptor. The third cover image I considered is an abstract long exposure shot that I took at night near some lights and the sea in Bodrum, Turkey.
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For History of Ethics: Essential Readings with Commentary (co-edited with, and commentary co-authored by, Roger Crisp), my first choice was a wide angle photograph that I took at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. I didn’t have permission from MoMA to use the image, so we went with the second image below, which is a more appropriate image for a history of ethics textbook, in any case. It’s a black and white photo of light spilling in to a dark cloister in a Princeton University building. It’s not actually a very old building, which makes my use of it for this book a little odd, perhaps, but one might still think it’s a fitting choice, given that philosophers are often in the business of remodeling older ideas.
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I took the photo of the cloisters during a year I was on sabbatical with my family in Princeton. While I was there, Errol Lord asked me to take a photograph of the staircase leading up to a room where he spent a lot of time when he was a graduate student, in order that he might use it for the cover of his monograph. I intentionally created an image with an unusual, flat perspective.
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The fifth of my photographs to have been used on a book cover is a photo of an I. M. Pei building in central Boston, where you can see the early evening light leaking in between parts of the building. Doug Portmore decided to use this image for the cover of the Oxford Handbook of Consequentialism.
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A sixth book featuring one of my photographs is Michael Blome-Tillmann's The Semantics of Knowledge Attributions. Michael selected the first of the mockups prepared by OUP, below. I agree with him that it's the best of these options for his book, although I also rather like the look of the second, merely imaginary book cover.
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Aeon magazine published an online article I wrote on photography. It is about the idea that photographs of people can capture their essence, and the relation of veracity to photography more generally. I would have liked the article to have included some different photographs than it did, but that sadly was not to be, as I detail here. My earlier, first attempt to write on photography was for a blog post on Aesthetics for Birds where I reflected on the then popular social media tag #nofilter. In retrospect, I think I should have presented this piece in a way that was less about criticizing use of that tag, and more about making the simple but important point that there is no filter-neutral way to produce a photograph: one can either wrestle with the question of how best to control how exactly one’s image is filtered (this is necessary even if, indeed especially if, one is aiming for realism), or defer to a particular manufacturer’s purposely crafted filter that is, as a matter of necessity, provided with your camera (or with a particular type of film, or with a particular default rendering in editing software). I subsequently tried my hand at being an art critic for this piece on the same website.
Photography and aesthetics are post-tenure interests for me. I have taught an advanced contemporary aesthetics and philosophy of photography course a few times now. At conferences and department colloquia, I first presented a paper on photography and artistic luck, and this is now a publication in Debates in Aesthetics. I have subsequently given presentations on aesthetic normativity, as well as on aesthetic judgments and appreciation (the latter presentations are based on a series of papers of appreciation that I am coauthoring with Joel Van Fossen). I am writing a book on the ethics of photography (it's under contract with Oxford University Press), and have also presented some of this work at conferences.
Photography and aesthetics are post-tenure interests for me. I have taught an advanced contemporary aesthetics and philosophy of photography course a few times now. At conferences and department colloquia, I first presented a paper on photography and artistic luck, and this is now a publication in Debates in Aesthetics. I have subsequently given presentations on aesthetic normativity, as well as on aesthetic judgments and appreciation (the latter presentations are based on a series of papers of appreciation that I am coauthoring with Joel Van Fossen). I am writing a book on the ethics of photography (it's under contract with Oxford University Press), and have also presented some of this work at conferences.