DEPICTING MOTION IN STATIC IMAGES. A PHILOSOPHICAL INQUIRY

In my thesis, I deal with the rarely discussed issue of whether motion can be depicted in static images and I provide a novel, and composite, view on the matter. Part I focuses on whether various pictures usually considered to be effective in representing motion are, actually, proper depictions of motion. Part II takes up two issues concerning distinctive aspects of depiction as a peculiar kind of representation – pictorial realism and inflection - and considers them in light of motion depiction and vice versa. In the first chapter, I focus on pictures that depict objects caught in the middle of dynamic actions, and, building on psychological studies on implied motion, I argue they can properly depict motion. In fact, I maintain, motion is part of the perceptual content of our experience of such pictures – and, hence, of their figurative content - even in the absence of motion-like phenomenology. In the second chapter, I deal with various devices exploited in different pictorial styles – such as comics’ motion marks or multiple images - and argue that some of them are actual depictions of aspects of our experiences of motion since they elicit recognition responses for actual optical effects we can experience in real-life situations when tracking fast-moving objects. In the third chapter, I discuss long exposure photographs resulting in streaky images, chronophotographs, and futurists’ paintings and argue we do not interpret them pictorially, but that to understand the temporal content of such images we pretend: we play games of make-believe using what we properly see in the picture – which is what is properly depicted – as a prop. In the fourth chapter, I consider two cases of optical illusions of movement - Op art’s scintillating effects and peripheral drift illusions - and conclude that one of them, the latter, is involved in the depiction of movement. All the accounts developed in the first part have profound consequences for thinking about the nature of pictures and pictorial experience – in particular, they often act as stress tests for different theories of depiction. In the first chapter of the second part, I then argue that various instances of both depicted and merely represented motion analyzed in the previous part enlighten different aspects of the concepts of pictorial realism (and unrealism); furthermore, I show how, vice versa, existing accounts of realism make the limits of motion depiction manifest. Finally, I argue there is a sense in which we can say that motion – or, better, the sense(s) of motion - can be inflected in static pictures: this analysis, on the one hand, expands the notion of inflection and its reach, and, on the other, gives a framework for analyzing the relationships between what has often been acknowledged to be a central aspect of our aesthetic appreciation of pictures – their dynamism – and pictorial experience – intended as seeing-in.