Steve Pyke It’s a dismal affair when the faces of people we don’t wish to remember - such as modern-day celebrities - easily spring to mind, while it’s difficult to conjure up the faces of people that really matter
Geoffrey and Mary Warnock. 1990
For a quarter of a century British photographer Steve Pyke has tried to “out” some of the world’s greatest thinkers, with almost 200 philosophers appearing in his acclaimed Philosophers series. Pyke’s aim was to bring philosophers into people’s lives because he believes that they’re, well, worth remembering. Pyke is a photographer for The New Yorker and is celebrated for the simplicity of his art - he sits subjects beneath a sunlit window and snaps with the minimum of fuss, little more than a couple of rolls of Tri-X, gaffer tape, a tripod and his Rolleiflex camera. He says he
likes to photograph the extraordinary, in this case philosophers, in a way that makes them more ordinary. His shots are just faces, swimming in darkness; we are drawn to the eyes, the turn of the head, the forehead, the mouth. Do they look sinister? Kindly? Intelligent? Unlike the body, facial features can’t hide behind fashion, nor be sculpted by physical exertion over time. The defenseless face is “nudity crying its strangeness in the world, his loneliness, death, hidden in his being,” writes French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas on the face-to-face encounter. The face communicates with others even before we have started to speak. In Pyke’s Philosophers series in particular, we may be prone to seek signs of intelligence in the portraits, especially in the eyes. Ayer’s eyes, for instance, look piercing, yet if we were told Ayer was a basketball coach or an actor, would we see his eyes in a different light?
Your look is how you live your life, says Pyke, who likes to get unflinchingly close to his subjects so no wrinkle or blemish goes unnoticed. You’re a drinker, and it’ll show: a smoker, or a clean living person, someone who loves the sun or shade. But whether we can glimpse a person’s character and personality from a face is a topic that dates back to the ancient Greeks. Termed physiognomy, Aristotle was receptive to the idea that we can infer character from features, and many novelists in the 18th and 19th centuries such as Charles Dickens and Charlotte Brontë used physiognomy in character descriptions. Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray is a classic tale of physiognomy; the portrait bears his sins - growing old and disfigured due to his indulgences.
Sir A. J. Ayer. 1988
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Steve Pyke
Steve Pyke
by Antonia Case NewPhilosopher ·
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“Philosophers mainly get hung up on the connection between consciousness and the brain, but my interest is in the historical structure of consciousness - how the consciousness of someone living in the thirteenth
“By doing philosophy we can discover eternal and mind-independent truths about the real nature of the world by investigating our own conceptions of it, and
Arthur Danto. 2003
Delia Graff Fara. 2004
by subjecting our most commonly or firmly held beliefs to what would otherwise be perversely strict scrutiny.” D e l i a G r a f f Fa r a
Steve Pyke
Steve Pyke
century has to have been different from the cons c i o u s n e s s o f someone liv ing as we do in the twentyfirst century.” A r t h u r D an t o
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John Gray. 2003
Richard Wolheim. 1990
“Other animals do not need a purpose in life. A contradiction to itself, the human animal cannot do without one. Can we not think of the aim of life as being simply to see?” J o h n G r ay
Philosophy@UWS At UWS we understand philosophy in an inclusive way. We bring philosophy into dialogue with literature, political theory, music, history, and the visual arts. We also run ‘Thinking Out Loud: The Sydney Lectures in Philosophy and Society’, bringing out leading international thinkers to UWS annually to present a series of public lectures on common themes. This lecture series is run in collaboration with ABC Radio National, the State Library of New South Wales and Fordham University Press. To find out more about Philosophy@UWS, visit
www.uws.edu.au/philosophy
Steve Pyke
Physiognomy, often written off as pseudoscience with no scientific foundation, is nevertheless the heart of portraiture, whether in a photograph, painting or sculpture. Portraiture is a conversation, or dance, between the artist and the sitter; the artist’s skill is to interpret the face of the person before them. “My place within a portrait session is to be subjective, not objective,” says Pyke. Pyke spends over three-quarters of any session chatting to his sitters and forming a connection with them. An hour long Judith Thomson. 2010 session will typically involve less than 10 minutes of shooting. Whether he is searching for character, personal identity, the soul, only Pyke knows or doesn’t, but it’s notable when something is captured, as is the case with Arthur Danto, one of the most arresting images of the series. The central tenet of Danto’s philosophy is the way we define our experience through stories, and how different the beginning is going to look to us when we see how it all ended. If we were to view Pyke’s Philosophers series 50 years from now, our perception of the portraits would be much altered. Photography is about mortality, says Pyke. “Photography is a suspension in time, it is also a memory, a moment captured and immediately gone.” Pyke is aware that the best he can achieve in any session is to make a portrait that reflects where the sitter is at that moment in time. And once that moment is over, the face will change again.
Photo taken by John Hadley 22 · NewPhilosopher
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