Costello, Diarmuid (2019) Without shame? Lee Friedlander's late self-portraits. In: Maes, Hans, (ed.) Portraits and Philosophy. Routledge Research in Aesthetics . London ; New York: Routledge. ISBN 9780367189402

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Abstract

The paper focuses on series of late Lee Friedlander self-portraits that seem to go out of their way to depict the aging photographer in the most unflattering light possible in light of recent debates in moral philosophy about the nature of shame. There is debate as whether shame is best conceived as autonomous or heteronomous, to be celebrated as a spur to moral self-improvement or condemned as a destructive form of self-punishment; but most endorse the basic idea that it involves a sudden, painful awareness of an asymmetry between first and third person perspectives—between one’s self-conception and one’s identity for others. I draw on Jean-Paul Sartre’s example of the voyeur in Being and Nothingness in relation to more recent accounts, such as David Velleman’s “The Genesis of Shame” (2001), Dan Zahavi, Self and Other: Exploring Subjectivity, Empathy and Shame (2014) and Krista K Thomason Naked: The Dark Side of Shame and Moral Life (2018). Sartre’s example is meant to bring out that shame betrays an awareness of our “being-for-others” that is intrinsically self-alienating; for Thomason it involves feeling over-determined by some aspect of one’s identity for others that is not constitutive to how one understands oneself; for Velleman it is a response to anything that over-rides our standing in our own eyes as “self-presenting” creatures. Self-portraiture is striking in this context because the self-portraitist occupies both poles of the asymmetric relation simultaneously. One might think this enables artists to retain control over how they show up for others; what makes Friedlander’s self-portraits especially interesting is that he sets things up in such a way as to photograph blind. In doing so he captures his own visage in ways he could never normally encounter it—even with the aid of a series of mirrors. It is not clear whether we should see the resulting images as internalizing a third personal, external vantage onto the self, as the possibility of feeling shame requires, or as eclipsing the possibility of shame altogether by expanding the first person vantage to the point that of occupying all available space. Pursued in such an unusual way, Friedlander’s self-portraits remain undecideable between the moral achievement of over-coming shame, by surviving an unforgiving form of perceptual self-objectification, and the moral failure of circumventing shame, by placing himself beyond its purview at the outset.

Item Type:	Book Item
Subjects:	B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > BH Aesthetics B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > BJ Ethics N Fine Arts > N Visual arts (General) For photography, see TR T Technology > TR Photography
Divisions:	Faculty of Social Sciences > Philosophy
Series Name:	Routledge Research in Aesthetics
Publisher:	Routledge
Place of Publication:	London ; New York
ISBN:	9780367189402
Book Title:	Portraits and Philosophy
Editor:	Maes, Hans
Official Date:	27 November 2019
Dates:	Date Event 27 November 2019 Published
Number of Pages:	328
DOI:	10.4324/9780429199370
Status:	Peer Reviewed
Publication Status:	Published
Related URLs:	Other

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