Is Photography Mimetic?

Paul Graham, Little Chef in Rain, St. Neots, Cambridgeshire, May 1982

A. D. Nuttall, in his A New Mimesis (1983), said a couple of questionable things about photography. Firstly, he said, “The camera is very good at mimesis.” This, to me, is a misunderstanding of photography. Photography records; it transcribes. Mimesis is imitative; it describes. Stanley Cavell, in his “What Photography Calls Thinking” (Raritan 4, Spring 1985), put it this way: 

A representation emphasizes the identity of its subject, hence it may be called a likeness; a photograph emphasizes the existence of its subject, recording it, hence it is that it may be called a transcription.

Secondly, Nuttall claimed, “Human art is naturally more interesting than photographic images.” By “human art,” he meant art produced by the mind and hand, e.g., painting. Photos are not human art? No, he said, they’re produced by machine, namely, the camera. But, in saying so, he overlooked an important point: the role of the eye. Mary Price, in her The Photograph: A Strange Confining Place (1994), says, “The eye is dominant in the way a photograph is conceived.” She goes on to say, “I would argue that the photographer’s mind operates significantly in formation of the picture.” This seems to me to be irrefutable. It follows that Nuttall’s conception of photography is seriously flawed.  

But I don’t want to be too hard on old Nuttall. I love his phrase “mimetic accuracy.” Vermeer is his example par excellence of mimetic accuracy. He says, “The great paintings of Vermeer can almost be described as seventeenth-century photographs.” Here, Nuttall seems to be saying Vermeer’s work is so mimetically accurate that it almost looks like photography. I agree. Interestingly, Andrew O’Hagan made a similar point recently. Reviewing the photos of Paul Graham, he praises their “Vermeer-like precision” (“On the A1,” London Review of Books, March 4, 2021).