Stephen Halliwell, the classicist and author of The Aesthetics of Mimesis: Ancient Texts and Modern Problems, gives a good account of Aristotle’s layered account of mimēsis as signification.

One layer in Aristotle’s account of mimēsis is that the creation and the experience of the mimetic arts (poetry, painting, sculpture, music, and dance) is rooted in a human aptitude, almost a biological need, for mimesis. His argument is brief, but it anticipates many later thinkers (among them, Vico, Freud and Benjamin) in seeing a connection between the culturally sophisticated practices of artistic traditions in theatre, painting, music, dance etc. and the make-believe or pretence of children’s play. Secondly, Aristotle separates the mimetic arts from the other categories or uses of discourse, especially those of philosophy/science and history.

Thirdly, Aristotle treats treat the mimetic arts both as entities in their own right, with their own principles of form and significance, and as a representational depiction of reality. Fourthly, the diversity within the depictional frame of reference enables mimēsis to adopt substantially different perspectives on the world extending from the actual to the ideal or fictional.

There is, therefore, a dual aspect to the mimetic arts in Aristotle: namely, the features of the art work as such and features of the kind of reality which it represents. The dual functions are allowing the poetic structure to be treated as an artefact with properties distinctive of and intrinsic to its design within particular media, and acknowledging the kinds of reality signified by and enacted within that design. Aristotle perceives a process of evolution constituted by active experiment and concern with representational modes, metrical forms, stylistic registers, and other intrinsic matters of poetic
resources.

Since the beginning of modern art history in the Renaissance (Vasari’s idea of period style the reception of Aristotle’s conception of mimesis in the Poetics by the humanists was to interpret mimesis as the “imitation of nature ” or “the mirror of nature.” The humanists built on the Romans (eg., Cicero and Quintilian) interpretation of Aristotle and the image came to be understood as an indexical copy of the visual field. It merges with the role of the camera in modernity as an objective renderer of the world when compared to distorting vision of the human eye, thereby emphasizing the absence of human contribution to the image. Photography’s images of record are then contrasted with those of engravings, paintings, etc., – which are man made reproductions of colors and forms in the visual field. These are images that incorporates personal experience, conception, memory and judgement.

The photograph becomes the non-human image and mimesis reduced to mechanical objectivity becomes common in the 20th century (eg., André Bazin who held that the photographic picture is the object itself, the object freed from the conditions of time and space that govern it). Human language as well as human observation are prone to error and distortion whereas the mechanical machine effortlessly captures the true qualities of the visual world through pictures. The epistemological commitment is to objectivity, to a form of certain knowledge beyond human judgment, and it reflects the desire within Western science and philosophy to construct an external view on reality, a view from beyond the human.

Thus photography’s picture uncontaminated by interpretation, a picture with an indexical relation to the natural world— fits into is positivism and its view from nowhere — the automatic machine as a superior observer. Snapshot photography was deemed fit to serve as a model for the neutral, unbiased, and objective view upon nature, or even the view of nature. The paradox for positivism is that there cannot be observation without sense-perception and its view from nowhere being detached from the social world; detached from the possibility for knowledge stemming from the fact that we share this world and its images with other human subjects; and detached from the subject who can interpret the picture.

The positivist interpretation of representation as “copies made by nature” –an index– is a long way from Aristotle’s dual-aspect interpretation of mimesis as a specific form of signification — that is, the uniquely human capacity to render and convey an intelligible configuration of human experience. These mimetic works, with their different ways of seeing, have the power to take us beyond the works themselves, thereby providing an opening to access knowledge. On this account photographs do not copy ready-made views of nature, but rather construct these views of certain aspects of reality–the cultivation of attention on the qualities of light.