In the past, I have dubbed the type of representation through modal ellipsis, that we saw in the coffee cup scene from Robert Bresson’s L’argent, ‘intimation’. The point about intimation is that it makes events intimate by representing them incompletely, i.e. not in all the sense modalities that an audience expects. There was visual representing…

Photographs used to be proof of the reality of their subject: what was on them proved to have existed. [Roland Barthes wrote an interesting booklet about this]. This evidential capacity distinguished photographs from their intentional counterparts, paintings. [Roger Scruton (1983) wrote a convincing article on this distinction.] Due to digitalization all this has changed thoroughly,…

1. All sorts of them. Let me sum up some types of discrepancies between originals and their copies. Some of these should tell us something about our concepts of ‘art’, ‘the authentic’, ‘forgery’, ‘representation’, and ‘reproduction’. A scene and its photographic representation; A scene and its painted representation; A scene and its description; A painting…