Photography is a representational media par excellence and I’ve been exploring how photographic representation has been reduced to mirroring on my Substack newsletter.

One form of this representation is mimēsis which traditionally has been interpreted since Bk 10 of Plato’s Republic and the Sophist as a mirroring of what is; despite the complexity of mimēsis in his texts which indicate that Plato makes mimēsis an unresolved problem, or rather a set of problems, rather than the subject of a unitary philosophical doctrine. As is well known the simple “mirror” conception of mimetic art has haunted photography throughout its history with the mirror theory being interpreted as transparent pictures. Mimesis has the status of an outmoded aesthetic doctrine; a broken column of an obsolete classical tradition.

If we turn back to Aristotle we find that Aristotle rejected the Platonic conception of mimetic transparency and replaced it with a layered account of mimēsis in the Poetics that is at quite at odds with the traditional “art imitates nature” interpretation of mimēsis. The mimetic arts, for Aristotle, are forms of poiesis (or productive craft), created artefacts with their artistic shaping of artistic materials, and forms of signification, but not one which posits a relation of “copy” to “original” as in Plato’s Republic. The visual is important in Aristotle’s view of mimesis.

This layered account of mimēsis as signification indicates that using the simple “mirror” thesis for photography is deeply misleading. Firstly, though the current translation of mimesis as “imitation” in English partially overlaps with, it does not closely enough match the Greek mimēsis. Secondly, the critics, propagandists, and ideologues in early European modernism used representation as imitation to displace and place limits around photography (ie., snapshots as transparent pictures) so as to justify and legitimate the dominance of modernist painting in the 20th century when photography was rapidly becoming the central visual media.

So we need to turn back to Aristotle’s account of mimesis in the Poetics as a specific form of signification.