Abstract

True to his plan to take photographs to find out what things look like photographed, Garry Winogrand liked to delay processing his exposed rolls in order to scrub the memory of what he had in mind when he tripped the shutter. In a rich and astute essay, Walter Benn Michaels puts Winogrand in company with G. E. M. Anscombe. One through photography, the other through philosophy, each explores, articulates, even plays up, the “difficulties” of making sense of what it is for an act to be structured by intentions. Thus Benn Michaels enlists Anscombe and Winogrand in a protest against a recent maneuver of mine that would dflate the difficulties that seem to come with the exercise of photographic agency.2 The reply is that Benn Michaels’s insights are spot on, but they do not block the deflationary maneuver. What happens in Benn Michaels’s reasoning is that new and interesting difficulties get raised about photographic meaning; I propose to deflate them too.