IMPROVISATION AND ARTISTIC PHOTOGRAPHY

This chapter aims at exploring a new field in aesthetics: improvisation in photography. As I will suggest, reflecting on the link between improvisation and photography contributes not only to seeing “photography as expression of human agency” (Costello 2017: 80), but also to better understanding the relation of intentional agency to art. In particular, I will argue that improvisation is artistically relevant to photography if the photo is seen (or understood) as ensuing from a shot that is, being at the same time performative and creative, the enactment of a “grammar of contingency.” Precisely in this regard, however, skepticism may arise about the possibility of applying the notion of improvisation to photography in a plausible and adequate way. Even if the photo is improvised, spectators do not directly perceive the process of improvisation, but only its result. Therefore, an account of the artistic specificity of improvisation in photography needs to discuss the aesthetic impact of the improvisational production of the photo on the final product or, to put it differently, the possible transparency of the photo not – as traditionally thought by scholars (see Walton 1984) – with respect to its referent (the photographed object), but with respect to the process of production: is it possible for onlookers to perceive the improvised photographic act? Moreover, is this improvised act artistically relevant? In what follows I propose possible answers to these questions.