Alphonso Lingis-- a philosopher taking pictures

Lingis is a distinguished philosopher and translator of Emmanuel Levinas. He also shoots pictures, and in this interview describes acts of photography and the activity of looking at images through the filter of his long involvement with phenomenology and existential philosophy. -- Here is the interview A.L. Thinking about photographic images, I think we come to revise the way philosophy distinguished between reality and image and between subjective and objective. Discover images that the things, and not the human mind, engender. Since Descartes and Locke and their friends, a critical question for philosophy was: How can I be sure that I am not dreaming? How establish the difference between perceptions that genuinely exhibit real things, and dreams that are concocted within the mind by the mind? "Images" in general were taken to be fabricated by the mind itself. I instead set out to recognize that the things themselves engender "images" or doubles of themselves--shadows, halos, the images of themselves they project on water, on the glass of windows---and also on the surfaces of the eyes of mammals, birds, fish. For example, the puddle of water that appears shimmering on the surface of the road ahead in a hot day is not "subjective," produced by the mind; it is engendered by the road and the sun and everybody in the car sees it.