Depicting Movement

ABSTRACT

The paper addresses an underexplored puzzle about pictorial representation, a puzzle about how depiction of movement is possible. One aim is to clarify what the puzzle is. It might seem to concern a conflict between the nature of static surfaces and the dynamic things that they can depict. But the real conflict generating the puzzle is between the pictorial mode of presentation and what can be seen in pictures. A second aim of the paper is to solve the puzzle. While many take it that depicting movement is to make visible something that has duration, I suggest that it is to make visible something atemporal.

KEYWORDS:

• depiction
• temporal experience
• visual perception

When I see the picture of a galloping horse – do I only know that this is the kind of movement meant? Is it superstition to think I see the horse galloping in the picture? – And does my visual impression gallop too? [Wittgenstein 1953: part II xi, sec. 175.]

1. Introduction

Pictures contrast with their depicta in some striking ways. A picture is flat, but can depict three-dimensional objects. A picture is a static display, but can depict something that moves. If pictures worked like language, this would not be puzzling, in so far as linguistic representation is conventional and anything can represent anything by convention. But, in contrast to language, pictures represent by, in some sense or other, letting us see something in them. Thus there is a puzzle: how can we see in a flat static surface something three-dimensional that moves? The part of this puzzle that concerns the spatial discrepancy between a two-dimensional vehicle of depiction and a three-dimensional depictum has received much attention in the philosophical literature on depiction (see, for instance, Peacocke [1987], Hopkins [1995], Lopes [2005], and Briscoe [2016]). But the part that concerns the spatio-temporal discrepancy between a static vehicle and a moving depictum remains underexplored. In this paper, I articulate this latter part of the puzzle (section 2) and consider some solutions (section 3). I suggest that one of the solutions can be extended to depictions of relatively static objects and scenes (section 4), and I thereby aim to renew our conception of what depiction of movement is.

2. The Puzzle

Clarifying what is puzzling about depiction of movement presupposes that some paintings or photographs depict movement or things in movement. In the limited debate that exists on depiction of movement, this claim is relatively uncontroversial [Gombrich 1982; Le Poidevin 2007: ch. 7; Walton 2008: ch. 10; Kulvicki 2016; Young and Calabi 2018; Nanay forthcoming]. For instance, Rosa Bonheur’s The Horse Fair (1852–5, exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) seems to depict horses moving with great force. At least part of Bonheur’s achievement is that the depicted horses do not look like they are standing still in unrealistic ways—for instance, maintaining poses that look impossible to balance or hovering above ground. It looks like they are galloping or rearing. In so far as one accepts (as I will in this paper) that this is how things look in Bonheur’s picture, one accepts that the picture depicts movement, or, equivalently, that we see movement in the picture.¹

How should we characterize what is puzzling about depictions like this one by Bonheur? The puzzle seems to arise from two observations:

1. some pictures depict movement;

2. pictures are themselves static.

Conjoined, these raise this question: how can a static surface depict a moving object or scene? This is not yet the formulation of a puzzle, as opposed to a mere question. It would be a puzzle if we could presuppose that depiction is what Currie [1995] calls a ‘homomorphic’ form of representation, representing like with like. Then one could only depict movement by means of something that moves, and it would be very puzzling, indeed seemingly impossible, that a static surface can depict movement. But we need only remind ourselves of the possibility of depiction of three-dimensional objects by means of a two-dimensional surface if we are to be convinced that depiction is not homomorphic.

Notably, the fact that depiction is not homomorphic raises its own puzzle. All picture perception is mysterious, in that the nature of the stimulus (the picture surface) differs from the nature of what we see in it. What is seen might be big, warm, and last for a short time, while the picture may be small, relatively cold, and last for a long time. This raises a question as to how non-homomorphic depiction is possible. But the puzzle about depiction of movement is more specific than that.

In order to formulate the puzzle, we need to identify a conflict between the dynamic element and the static element. One could attempt to do this by using one’s favourite theory of depiction. It is not clear that every such theory can construe depiction of movement as puzzling. For instance, given an experienced resemblance theory of depiction [Peacocke 1978; Hopkins 1998], there is a question as to how a static surface can be experienced as resembling a moving object or scene. But, to the extent that anything can be experienced as resembling anything else, there is no obstacle to depicting movement on this theory. Identifying an obstacle would require introducing restrictions on experienced resemblance to movement.² Instead of presupposing a particular theory of depiction—which might not be sufficient for formulating a puzzle anyway—I will seek to identify a conflict between the static and the dynamic element by taking a closer look at those observations, (1) and (2), that seem to generate the puzzle.

2.1 Some Pictures Depict Movement

In order to clarify (1), it is useful to consider some examples of how depiction of movement can be achieved. I have already mentioned Bonheur’s The Horse Fair. Bonheur portrays horses in positions that they cannot maintain for a very long time—for instance, as standing on two feet. That might be one strategy for depicting movement. A similar strategy might be to portray people in action. This is an achievement that Rembrandt allegedly pioneered in The Night Watch (1642: Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam). Another strategy might be (instead of exploiting features of the motif) to use a certain style to create blur or to make the direction of brushstrokes indicate direction of movement. This seems to be what creates the sense of a rolling sea in J.M.W. Turner’s Snowstorm (1859–61: The British Museum, London). It can also be achieved in photography by using long exposure time to create streaky photos. I take the examples mentioned to be some of the paradigmatic examples of depiction of movement.

There are also some borderline cases to consider. Jackson Pollock made works like One: Number 31, 1950 (1950: Museum of Modern Art [MoMA], New York) by placing the canvas on the floor and then pouring, dribbling, and flicking paint onto it. According to MoMA, the painting is a ‘visual record of gestures and actions’. My reasons for thinking that this is not a depiction of movement are that (i) we see traces of movement, and not movement itself, when looking at this picture and (ii) even if one thinks that seeing these traces is to see a past movement made by Pollock, that past movement is seen not in the picture, but rather on the painted surface. In the paradigmatic examples mentioned above, by contrast, movement is seen in the picture.

Another borderline case is constituted by paintings like Davide’s The Nativity (c.1495: Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna), where the direction of the depicted people’s gaze or pointing gestures draws the spectator’s gaze towards what is pointed or gazed at—in this case, the new-born Christ in the centre of the picture. While art historians would say that there is movement in this picture, I would not count it as a depiction of movement. There is movement of the spectator’s eyes, but no movement is seen in the picture.

A third category of borderline cases are optical illusions of movement. For instance, Bridget Riley’s Current (1964: MoMA) exploits the McKay illusion and creates an experience of a wave-like horizontal movement in a pattern of close curved vertical lines. Another example is Monet’s Poppy Field (1873: Musée d’Orsay, Paris), where, as Livingstone [2002] explains, low-luminance contrast is used to create the illusion that the poppies in the field change position. There is interesting work in psychology and neuroscience explaining why these optical effects arise.³ However, focusing instead on how optical illusions (versus depictions of movement) look, there are two notable differences to the mentioned paradigmatic cases of depiction of movement.

One difference is that the illusory movement is seen on the surface, and not in the picture. Monet’s Poppy Field is a useful example, since it is both a depiction and an illusion of movement. The illusory movement is a movement of red spots on a green background surface. Their movement might well contribute to there being a depicted movement of the field as the wind blows across it, seen in pictorial space. But the illusory movement of the red spots is not located in pictorial space.

A second difference between how illusions and depictions of movement look is that only the former seems to currently move. In Riley’s Current, the movement seems to be happening now. In pictures like Bonheur’s The Horse Fair, by contrast, the galloping horses do not seem to move at a time simultaneous with our own temporal present. Nevertheless, they look to be in movement.

The few points made about borderline cases versus depiction of movement are by no means exhaustive. But they place some restrictions on the formulation of our puzzle. In order to have a puzzle, and not a mere question, we need to identify an obstacle to depicting movement by means of a static surface. One might think that the obstacle is that a static surface cannot seem to move. Accounts of illusion might have to explain this away. But, in depiction of movement, the surface does not seem to move. Rather, something that looks to be in movement without currently moving is seen in the surface. Thus, our search for the formulation of a puzzle proceeds with the following query: is there an obstacle to depicting something that looks be in movement by means of a static surface? In order to make progress, I suggest that we examine what is meant by saying that pictures are static.

2.2 Pictures Are Static

The observation that pictures are static is rooted in a distinction between temporal and spatial arts. As Fodor puts it, ‘Whereas spoken language and music are presented in time, pictures are presented in space’ [1975: 186]. Pictures, one might therefore conclude, cannot present something that takes time, such as movement or duration, in so far as something that takes time must be presented in time.

But is it true that pictures are presented only in space? Pictures are, after all, spatio-temporal objects, and are thus presented in both time and space. In fact, some pictures are presented over a very long time, sometimes several centuries. Moreover, the space used to present them during that time (the picture surface) might, as painting conservators are very aware, change: the colours fade and cracks appear on the surface. What does not change, interestingly, is what we see in the picture. It might become more difficult to see when the colours fade, but it does not change. Thus, one might think that the place to look for pictures’ static nature is in our experience of the surface, rather than the surface itself. Perhaps pictures are static in the sense that the temporal properties of our experience of the surface make no difference to the temporal properties of what we see in it.

Walton [2008] seems to think so. He construes the puzzle about depiction of movement as concerning a conflict between the duration of what is depicted and the duration of the experience of it in the picture. On the assumption that what is depicted is a momentary state or a ‘very short time slice’, he asks how it can be that ‘we may continue “seeing” the momentary state of affairs for five minutes or an hour or all day’ [ibid.: 172]. Walton thus seems to presuppose that the unpuzzling case is when our experiences of something temporally extended last for the same amount of time as does what is experienced. Correspondingly, the puzzle is this: how it is possible for the duration of the visual experience of a picture to differ from the duration of what is seen in it?

If this is the puzzle about depiction of movement, it would not be specific to depiction of movement. It would be a sub-puzzle of the following puzzle about temporal experience: how can the duration of what one perceives differ from the duration of the perceptual experience? To my mind, this does not seem right. Experiential responses to pictures differ significantly from the responses to objects and scenes face-to-face. For instance, flat picture surfaces can give rise to experiences of three-dimensional objects. When this is found puzzling, this is usually not treated as a sub-puzzle of a more general puzzle about how we can experience flat objects as three-dimensional. The puzzle arises because we are experiencing a picture. Similarly, I think that it is because we are seeing a picture that we are able to see an object that looks to be in movement in a static surface. While it may in general be puzzling that one can experience something of a short duration for a long time—if one indeed can (see Phillips [2014])—it is not puzzling that this can happen in a picture. What is puzzling is how it can.

Thus, explicating the static nature of pictures in terms of the experience of the surface does not look promising. The surface is the key to explicating how pictures are static, I think. Not the surface’s temporal properties; as we observed above, these change: for instance, the colours fade. But there is something about the surface that makes possible the characteristic picture experience. More specifically, I suggest that the surface is static in the sense of always remaining unchanged in the way that it accomplishes its presenting of what we see in it. That is, a picture is static, in that the way that the picture presents what we see in it does not change as history progresses, even if the picture surface should change.⁴

In order for this suggestion to work, it is crucial that the notion of ‘presentation’ that we are using does not just collapse into ‘representation’. The idea would then be identical to the one that we are seeking to elucidate—namely, that pictures are static representations. Let me therefore elaborate a little on what I mean by saying that pictures present in a static way.

Presenting statically is not identical to using something unchanging to represent. Even if picture surfaces, contrary to fact, did not fade in colour, etc., they would not necessarily present statically. Rather, the key idea concerns which aspects of the surface’s nature matter to what we see in it. This is perhaps more readily appreciated with regard to the surface’s flatness. To present something flatly is not identical to using a flat thing to represent. A picture surface might be wrapped around a column, and hence be a convexly curved surface, or it might become creased or full of cracks due to bad maintenance. But what we see in the surface when seeing it as a picture is not affected by the curves, creases, and cracks (other than that they can make it harder to see). So, the picture presents the flat way in the sense that any three-dimensional features of it would be irrelevant to what is seen in it.

We can explain static presentation analogously. A picture surface might be held in one’s hands and shaken, or it might contain movement internal to the surface, as when a slightly malfunctioning LED screen is flickering. But what we see in the surface when seeing it as a picture is not affected by the shaking and the flickering (other than that this can make it harder to see). So, the picture presents statically in the sense that any temporal features of it would be irrelevant to what is seen in it, or, as Walton puts it, the temporal properties have ‘no bearing on its representational content’ [2008: 164].

As Walton [ibid.: 163] points out, cinematic representations do not present their objects statically in this sense. Some temporal features of the surface would make a difference to what it represents. We can develop this idea as follows: seeing a change of the surface can be to thereby see a change happening to what is represented.⁵ One might think that precisely this possibility is needed if we are to see something that looks to be in movement in a surface. But pictorial representation precludes it. If a surface is seen as a picture depicting, say, Mary by one part of the surface at one time and by another at another time (for instance, because certain marks are erased from the surface and others are added), then one option would be to regard this as there being two different pictures at the different times. Another option would be to regard it as one picture that first depicted Mary at location 1 and then depicted her at location 2. But the picture, in contrast to cinema, stays silent on any connection between Mary’s placement at the two locations. It stays silent on this because pictures present their objects in such a way that seeing the surface change cannot be to thereby see what is depicted change. And for this reason, it seems like it cannot depict movement.

Summing up, then, I think that we should explicate pictures as static in terms of their characteristic static manner of presentation. This gives us a clear conflict between a static and a dynamic element: Something—say, a horse—is seen in a surface and looks to be in movement (observation 1), but it is all the time looking the same way, in the sense that no change seen happening to the surface amounts to a change seen happening to the horse (observation 2). So, the puzzle about depiction of movement can be formulated thus: how can something that looks to be in movement be seen in a surface that all the time presents its object as looking the same way, in the sense that seeing the surface change cannot be to thereby see the depicted object change?

A spatial aspect of this conflict generates the puzzle about depiction of three-dimensional objects: pictures present things in the flat way, but they need not present things as flat. In contrast, the spatio-temporal aspect of the conflict generates the puzzle about depiction of movement: pictures present things in the static way, but they need not present things as static. Thus, there is an obstacle to depicting movement: The mode of presentation that is special to pictures seems to prevent it.

3. Some Attempts at Solving the Puzzle

A solution to the puzzle developed in the previous section should resolve the conflict between the static nature of pictures’ manner of presentation and the dynamic nature of what is seen in the picture. The solutions can be divided into two groups, according to which side of the conflict is taken as the starting-point.

1. Coming from the dynamic side, one starts from the observation that what we see in the picture looks to be in movement. Given that movement takes time, we can make this side unproblematic by hypothesising that what we see in the picture is temporally extended. Something that is temporally extended can be in movement, and hence can unproblematically look to be that way. What remains puzzling, however, and what needs to be explained by solutions of this first sort, is how a temporally extended movement can be presented statically, in the sense that seeing the surface change cannot be to see the depicted object change.

2. Coming from the static side, one starts from the observation that what we see in the picture is all of the time presented as looking the same way, in the sense that seeing the surface change cannot be to see the depicted object change. This would be unproblematic to account for if what we see in the picture is not temporally extended. For change takes time, and hence there will be no change to present by means of changes of the surface. There are two ways to make this denial, however. Either (a) one can claim that what we see in the picture is at a moment, or (b) one can claim that it is something atemporal. In either case, what remains puzzling, and what needs to be explained by solutions of this second sort, is how something that has no temporal extension can look to be in movement.

In the next three subsections, I explore solutions of type (1), (2a), and (2b).

3.1 Solution 1: What We See in Pictures Is Temporally Extended

The first solution is inspired by something that I saw in one of the Harry Potter movies. A picture of the young wizard’s parents is shown as a film clip constantly on repeat, where the parents are caught in a rotational movement. Although the picture qualifies as a cinematic representation, it inspires a solution to our puzzle. Just as the film clip of Harry’s parents is running on repeat independently of Harry’s temporal reality, the suggestion would be that the horses’ movement in Bonheur’s picture is happening in a temporal reality that is independent of the spectator’s. Then there is no puzzle as to how something seen in that temporal reality can be in movement, since it can be temporally extended. But we need to explain how this temporally extended movement can be presented in the same way forever, as it would have to do if seen in a picture.

It would be compatible with the suggestion to claim that the temporal reality of the horses’ movement is of the same kind as that which we experience in everyday life. Walton [2008: ch. 10] presupposes this when he suggests that the duration of what is depicted might come apart from the duration of our experience of the picture. But this leads to a problem: how long is the duration of the horses’ movement? Three seconds? Walton operates with exact durations like this of what is depicted. The problem is that it seems unclear how pictures, especially non-photographic ones, can settle the exact duration of the movement seen in them.

But perhaps this is not something that we have to settle. One could hold that the horses’ movement in Bonheur’s painting is such that there is no answer to the question as to how long it takes and exactly when it starts and ends. Kulvicki [2016] proposes a similar idea when explaining how long-exposure photographs can ‘record’ temporal patterns. What gets recorded, he thinks, are temporal patterns without direction and determinate extension. There is before, now, and after—both to Kulvicki’s temporal patterns and to the inexact durations of the horses’ movement. What is remarkable is that, from the perspective of the spectator, what happens before, now, and after can be seen all at once. That is why it is possible, on this solution to the puzzle, for a picture to present something in movement the same way forever.

The sketched solution has much in common with the one that I will put forward as my preferred solution in section 3.3. Both face the challenge of explaining why a picture like Bonheur’s depicts horses in one kind of movement (a movement it takes time to see), when what we see in it is a movement of a different kind (a temporally extended movement seen all at once). I address this challenge in section 3.4. However, the present solution is committed to explaining depiction of movement as a matter of seeing in the picture something of duration and in change. I think that commitment is unnecessary, and this marks the main difference between the present solution and the one that I prefer. Alternatively, one might find the commitment implausible, rather than just unnecessary, on the ground that many depictions of movement show us something happening at a moment—a cyclist at great speed caught perfectly clearly with short exposure, say. This brings us to a second way of solving the puzzle.

3.2 Solution 2a: What We See in Pictures Is at a Moment

Let us now work from the supposition that what we see in pictures is not temporally extended, and more specifically that it occurs at a moment—in time but not over time. What we see in Bonheur’s painting, for instance, would then be a horse in a position that it holds at one moment of its gallop. Since there can be no change at one moment, a moment can be presented in the same way forever, and hence it is not puzzling how pictures can present moments. But it is puzzling how something that occurs at a moment can look to be in movement. This is what we must explain.

An explanation might seem forthcoming if what we see at a moment is not a frozen pose, but instead is the instantaneous velocity of an object—its velocity vector. Something that has velocity is in movement. But seeing the velocity vector is not to see any velocity; it is merely to see some of its properties—namely, its direction and magnitude. We need to explain why seeing these properties—or, more generally, seeing something that occurs at a moment—is to see something in movement.

A good starting-point for one approach to an explanation is Chuard’s [2011] atomist view of temporal experience. According to him, even face-to-face awareness of movement, succession, order, duration, and temporal relations generally is generated from momentary perceptual experiences. We are aware of an apple falling, he explains, because we have awareness of a range of successive past and future momentary experiences of the apple’s fall. Of course, in a depiction of a moving horse, there is only one moment of which one has a perceptual experience. Thus, Chuard’s view does not have direct application. But perhaps seeing the momentary position of the horse in the picture makes us aware of memories of horses moving, and this lets us, as Chuard envisages for face-to-face experience, synthesise an overall awareness of movement. A similar idea is put forward by Nanay [forthcoming]. He suggests that, in pictures of movement, temporal mental imagery lets us represent what happened before and after, say, the position that the horse holds in the picture. Even though what we see in the picture happens at one moment, we can have an experience of what would happen just before and after that moment because we have temporal mental imagery of this.

Each of Nanay’s view and my application of Chuard’s view to pictures constitutes a psychological solution to the puzzle, in the sense that general psychological mechanisms are taken to suffice for explaining why, for instance, a horse’s movement is seen in the picture. This puts those solutions on a par with Gombrich’s [1964] account of depiction of movement. According to him, there is a ‘sluggishness’ of our perception, such that we never perceive moments understood as temporal points. Static images create in us the same ‘memories and anticipations of movement’ [ibid.: 61] that he thinks we, due to the sluggishness of our perception, are accustomed to experience face-to-face when in contact with momentary stimuli.

I worry that psychological solutions bring us too close to the third option that Wittgenstein presents in the quotation with which I opened—that ‘my visual impression gallop[s]’—rather than the second option, which I think is what we would like—that we see the horse galloping in the picture. Gombrich, in particular, is explicit about the fact that his solution means attributing to pictures things that are not there; he compares it to how one might ‘hear’ the top note that a tenor sings in the midst of a difficult aria, without the tenor actually producing any sound [ibid.: 49]. Moreover, if general psychological mechanisms suffice for explaining why what is seen in some pictures looks to be in movement, the puzzle is treated as a sub-puzzle of a puzzle about experience, and (as I argued in section 2.2) I do not think that is right. So, although psychological solutions remain viable despite the mentioned reservations, I prefer a solution that takes the nature of what is seen in the picture, and not only the psychological mechanisms used to process it, as the key to explaining depiction of movement.

3.3. Solution 2b: What We See in Pictures Is Atemporal

My preferred solution to the puzzle has in common with the previous one that what we see in depictions of movement is taken to not be temporally extended. I suggest that we see, not moments, but rather something atemporal—something that is not in time. This suggestion could also be coupled with a psychological solution to the puzzle. The idea, very briefly, would be to explain the temporal element of what we see in the picture as derived from temporal properties of our experience when looking at the picture. However, I will focus on a different way of developing the suggestion.

The core idea is to identify a severance between movement and change. Note that the reason why it seems puzzling that something that looks to be in movement can be seen in a surface, although there is no possibility of seeing a change of the surface and thereby seeing a change happening to the depicted object, is that a particular assumption is made: namely, being in movement requires change. Given this assumption, it is contradictory that something that looks to be in movement (that is, something changing) can look the same way all of the time (that is, look unchanged). But it is not clear that we should accept the assumption that gives rise to this contradiction.

In order to see why, consider first a non-pictorial example. Perhaps you have noticed, during a day in front of the computer, how it requires constant effort to maintain a good posture. As one of my ballet teachers explained, one needs constantly to feel as though one increases the position, constantly fills it, if one is to maintain it; otherwise, gravity takes its toll and collapse results. If one is interested not just in standing still, but also in making a beautiful pose, one can make the upwards stretch visible. By lowering one’s shoulders, making one’s neck as long as possible, elongated but relaxed, one can create a look of extending indefinitely upwards. This is a way of being in movement without changing position, I think. As analysed by a machine that tracks bodily position and muscle contraction, it might simply be to exert a force. But that is not how it feels or looks. In a special skilful way that might take a dance student a long time to master, one is in movement, in the sense of creating a dynamic stretch upwards, constantly reaching out of the position, although without changing it.

I think that a similar way of being in movement without changing is what we see in depictions of movement. For instance, the horses in Bonheur’s painting look to be galloping, although their position does not look to change. A difference is that only maintaining one’s posture as described occurs at a specific time. But this is no crucial difference. For the fact that maintaining one’s posture occurs in time is not what is responsible for its dynamic character. The skilful posing is what is reponsible. This kind of movement is thus not essentially temporal. When it is seen in a picture, I think, is atemporal, in the sense that it is not occurring at any specific time. We see something that never changes, but that constantly is about to do so, for each moment that we look at it. The assumption identified as generating a contradiction in our puzzle can thus be rejected, and the puzzle dissolves. Since there is no change to what we see in the picture, there is no obstacle to presenting something that looks to be in movement in the same way forever. For there is no conflict between seeing something that looks to be in an atemporal movement in a picture surface, and there being no possibility of seeing that thing change by seeing a change of the surface.

A distinctive feature of this solution to the puzzle is that nothing needs to be said about the horses’ movement before and after what is seen in the picture. This marks a stark contrast to much of the literature on depiction of movement. The focus has often been on how pictures can depict something temporally extended: something that has duration. For instance, Walton [2008: ch. 10] considers a range of alternatives as to how the durations of what is depicted and what is experienced in the picture compare with each other. Kulvicki [2016] similarly focuses on explaining how photographs can depict temporally extended events. Even Nanay [forthcoming], who seems to think that what we see in a picture is something temporally nonextended, aims to explain how the picture, by giving rise to temporal mental imagery, lets us have an experience of what comes before and after, hence of something duration-like. And the psychological explanations offered by Gombrich [1964] and Le Poidevin [2007: ch. 7] also focus on how our processing of the static picture can give rise to an experience of something that has duration. In contrast to all of this, my solution does not explain how pictures can let us see something that has duration. It explains how they let us see something in movement that does not change. I do not wish to deny that pictures can, for instance, give rise to temporal mental imagery of what would happen before and after the depicted scene; indeed, I find it very plausible that they do. But making such a claim is not necessary for providing my solution to the puzzle about depiction of movement.

3.4 Challenges to Solution 2b

Like solution 1, solution 2b faces the challenge of making room for depiction of ordinary movement. For, in so far as what is seen in a picture is identical to what is depicted, only the described kind of changeless atemporal movement can be depicted. That seems like an implausible result, for at least some pictures. Bonheur’s The Horse Fair, for instance, clearly depicts ordinary galloping.

The challenge can be overcome by distinguishing between what a picture depicts and what we see in it. We can claim the following: depicting a movement involving change requires making a changeless atemporal movement visible in the picture. For instance, in order to depict a horse’s gallop, an artist must make visible something else in the picture—namely, the horse’s changeless movement, as its hooves are about to hit the ground but never do. Seeing this in the picture is to see a depiction of a horse’s gallop.

The key idea, then, is that what we see in a picture might come apart from what is depicted. Is such discrepancy possible? Yes. In fact, it also occurs in other cases. As Hopkins [1998] suggests, a black-and-white photograph can depict coloured blocks, but what we see in it is not coloured. In general, what pictures depict might be less determinate than what we see in them, he claims [ibid.: 124–46]. Conversely, it could be argued that what is seen in pictures might be less determinate than what they depict. What we see in a picture might have no determinate shade of yellow, although what it depicts—a sunflower, say—does. Arguably, my present claim goes slightly further, because something of a different nature (something changeless and atemporal, and not just something less determinate than what is depicted, is claimed to be seen in the picture.⁶ Nevertheless, the key distinction is in both cases is between what is seen and what is depicted.

One might suspect at this point that what I have suggested is closer to a change of subject than a solution. Changeless movement might seem like an inconsistent notion, one might think, in so far as movement is change in position over time. So, whatever dancers detect in the difference between an ‘elongation’ and the lack of it in a pose, and whatever we see in Bonheur’s picture, cannot be movement, since it does not change.

In response to this challenge, I would point out that, although I think that there is reason to call what we see in depictions of movement ‘movement’, labelling it thus is not crucial to my solution to the puzzle. What is crucial is that we can explain why seeing it—whatever we call it—is to see a depiction of movement. The idea is that we see something that is about to go somewhere or to change position, without in fact doing just that. This is how something that changes position looks when it is all the time presented in the same way. Notice, however, that this explanation gives us a reason to call what we see in the picture ‘movement’. It is related to movement as follows: it involves visibly being about to change position, and thus visibly being about to move in that sense. Having this appearance is not coincidental. It is an integral part of what being in changeless movement is, like having the appearance of being green is integral to being green. This constitutes a reason for taking the appearance to be part of the nature of the thing, and for calling it a kind of movement.

4. Movement in Stills

In outlining the puzzle above, I relied upon an intuitive idea that some depictions are special and depict movement. But, in fact, I think that there is an element of movement in many more pictures than the examples discussed thus far. I will end this paper by indicating how I think the suggestion that we see changeless atemporal movement (solution 2b) can be applied to further cases. This will help to illuminate what the suggestion is.

What would it be to depict something that is static like a picture is? Pictures are static, we saw above, in the sense that there is no possibility of seeing the depicted object change by seeing a change of the surface. Hence, in depictions of things like galloping horses or rolling waves, there seems to be a conflict between the picture’s manner of presentation and what it presents. Something that looks to be in movement is, all of the time, looking the same way. The question that I am raising now is this: if we wanted to avoid this conflict, what sort of depicta would we have to pick?

My sense is that picking standard motifs like a person seated, a tranquil landscape, or a bowl of fruit will not do. Very few of the objects and scenes that we perceive face-to-face are static in the sense that they, all of the time, are presented in the same way. People blink, the wind blows across the landscape, and light moves across the fruit bowl. Moreover, these relatively tranquil depicta are often portrayed by artists as non-static. Especially with regard to portraiture, a good picture portrays its subject as hoping, feeling, thinking, looking somewhere, aspiring to something—in short, as living.⁷ This motivates suggesting that, even in pictures where no movement is depicted, what is seen in the picture can be something in atemporal movement. In order to depict a lifelike person or landscape, something else is made visible in the picture—something that never changes, but constantly is about to do so, for each moment that we look at it.

Some support for this suggestion, and especially for extending it to pictures of inanimate objects, can be found in instructions given to artists. In The Natural Way to Draw, a famous textbook on drawing, Nicolaïdes teaches his students gesture drawing by giving instructions like the following: ‘Try to draw the actual thrust of the jaw, the clenching of the hand. A drawing of prize fighters should show the push, from foot to fist, behind their blows that make them hurt’ [1941: 15]. Later, when teaching his students how to draw inanimate objects, he provides a strikingly similar instruction, focusing on what the object is doing [ibid.: 30]:

Look at a lamp and think of what it is doing. It spreads out to hold a certain amount of kerosene. The glass chimney holds back the wind from the flame. … the base of the lamp may have a sturdy, smug look which suggests to you a well-fed prosperous business man with a neat collar holding his head straight up.

This is grist to my mill in two ways. First, Nicolaïdes’s descriptions suggest that a similar effort is involved in drawing a prize fighter’s blow as in drawing a lamp’s posture. Thus, there is continuity between moving depicta and relatively static ones. This is also part of what I suggest. Second, in the case of the lamp, Nicolaïdes asks his student to give it the look of doing something, although it is not changing. This is to make the lamp look to be in changeless movement, as I would put it.

An additional reason for extending my solution of the puzzle as suggested is that it gives us a new handle on temporality in pictures—for instance, the depiction of events. As Gombrich [1964] argues, events are often and best depicted by juxtaposing different temporal parts of it. It is striking that such depictions of events do not come across as unfaithful. My suggestion can explain this. If what we see in the picture is something atemporal, there is nothing unfaithful about showing in the same picture visual presentations that could only be seen at different times face-to-face.

Although I have provided no exhaustive discussion of the topic, I hope to have made it seem promising to extend the suggestion that changeless atemporal movement can be seen in pictures to depictions of relatively tranquil scenes and objects. Its promise stems both from its coherence with instructions like those that Nicolaïdes provides and its flexibility in accounting for temporality in pictures. But the main reason for making the extension is that it seems very difficult to think of depicta that are static like a picture’s manner of presentation is—things that, forever and to all time, are presented in the same way. Such things are eternal. When presenting eternal objects, like God or angels, artists usually resort to depicting them as perishables like ourselves. If I am right that what we see in pictures can look to be in an atemporal movement, and if what we see in pictures can be identical to what is depicted, then a truthful depiction of God should be possible (or, rather, one truthful to His temporal aspects). However, as I said, what is seen in pictures can, and often does, differ from what is depicted. Thus, while what we see may be horses in atemporal movement, what is depicted can be horses in ordinary gallop.⁸

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Additional information

Funding

I would like to acknowledge financial support from the Norwegian Research Council (project number 275456).

Notes

1 An alternative would be to claim that the picture merely represents, but does not depict, movement. See Kulvicki [2016] for discussion.

2 In so far as there is something puzzling about depiction of movement, it might count against a theory of depiction that it fails to accommodate movement. However, as Abell [2009: 184] points out, not all theories of depiction aim to explain how pictures depict what they do (e.g. movement); some explain only what features a representation must have in order to be a depiction.

3 Livingstone explains that, in the Monet mentioned here, our What system can distinguish the poppies from the grass, but our Where system, which uses luminance contrast to differentiate positions, cannot do so, and they therefore seem to move or change position. The McKay illusion, which Riley’s painting exploits, is not well understood [Livingstone 2002: 160]. But, as Wade [1978] discusses, it has been attributed to the observers’ saccadic eye movement and to asymmetries in the eye varying with accommodation.

4 This claim needs some qualifications. Does what we see in the picture change if we draw moustaches on everyone’s faces? It might do si, if the moustaches are drawn in such a way that it looks like they were there from the start, or if true to the artist’s intentions. I think that such changes should be considered to be part of the picture-making process. By contrast, non-authentic changes to the picture surface do not change what is depicted, although they might make it more difficult to see or to take seriously. What we see in a picture can also change as a result of a change in our perception. For instance, everyone used to see a commercial product in a picture of a Brillo box, but now they see a part of Andy Warhol’s artwork. What we see in the picture changes as history progresses, but not due to features of the picture. Hence, I would not count this as a change in the way that the picture does its presenting.

5 It need not, though. As Walton [ibid.: 163] mentions, a changing surface can depict a stationary scene in cinema, because it might be the camera and not the scene that moves.

6 This combines nicely with the idea that pictures let us see other kinds of things than what we see face-to-face [Aasen 2016].

7 Relatedly, Freeland explains that in portraiture ‘the painter seeks to convey the subject’s unique essence, character, thoughts and feelings, interior life, spiritual condition, individuality, personality, and emotional complexity’ [2007: 98].

8 Thanks to Robert Hopkins, Antonia Peacocke, Keith Wilson, and three anonymous referees for this journal for helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper. Thanks also to the audiences at the University of Glasgow, Institut Jean-Nicod, and the University of Oslo, where this material has previously been presented.