Alex King at Aesthetics for Birds: Steve Pyke is a renowned portrait photographer. He has published ten books, including the award-winning I Could Read the Sky (with Timothy O’Grady). He has photographed politicians, astronauts, film directors, artists, laborers, and—in two collected volumes—philosophers. He was the staff photographer at The New Yorker for several years and, in 2004, was appointed an MBE. His work has been exhibited worldwide and is held in many permanent collections, including the National Portrait Gallery and the V&A Museum. See more at his website, Pyke-Eye.
Here, he is interviewed by philosopher and Aesthetics for Birds chief editor Alex King.
AK: Let’s start off where your story with philosophers begins. Could you tell me a bit about the original “Philosophers” series?
SP: I’ve made two series of portraits of philosophers. The first series was during the late ’80s and ’90s and contained about eighty people, and the second continued through the ’90s until 2008 and contained a hundred more.
The first series came about after Sir A.J. Ayer suggested I do it. The series had a big impact because it outed what philosophers actually looked like. Remember, when I photographed the philosophers the first time around, there was no internet. There was no way of knowing what a philosopher looked like unless they were pictured on a book jacket. I think Quine had a picture that was photographed in the forties! They were not that image-conscious a bunch. Not then.
I met the most amazing people—people like Jack Rawls and David Lewis. When I met Freddie Ayer, he was an 88- or 90-year-old man. He was very much seen as the face of philosophy after Bertrand Russell.
But I wasn’t able to speak their language, the language of philosophy. I don’t come from that world and in a lot of ways it’s not what interested me in the philosophy world. Even though I didn’t speak to Ayer about Language, Truth, and Logic, we had common ground. We’d both been part of the same time, and that narrative of our time was the common language. That and football—he was a Spurs supporter!
AK: How did you pick which philosophers to photograph?
SP: I don’t pick them at all. They pick themselves. Whenever I’d photograph a philosopher, I would ask them, “Who are ten people alive that have had an influence on your work that I should photograph?” And whenever the name came up three times, was mentioned by three philosophers, that’s when I contacted that person. It wasn’t easy to find them, either. At that time, I employed a researcher who tracked them down. Their job was to find someone like Martha Nussbaum, to literally call around and ask where I could find her.
AK: And what did you think of photographing those non-image-conscious philosophers? Did you find them to be good, bad, or unusual sitters?
SP: They didn’t make particularly good or bad sitters. Everyone’s different. Everyone has a different reaction to my camera. There were bashful, vain, demonstrative, and coy sitters amongst them, as there are anywhere. My process of photographing is very formal, and very minimal as well. The camera is over sixty years old and sits on a tripod. There’s some direction going on, but really I’m recording a conversation. I also shoot very little film, usually three rolls, which is only thirty-six frames.
Perhaps the philosophers were a little less used to being photographed. At that time, I was photographing a lot of film directors. They release a film every year, and they have to be photographed for that, so they’re used to it. With philosophers, some of them had never been photographed. You could tell it was an unusual experience for them.
Nobody had really photographed philosophers before as a series. This was the first time anyone had put together a survey of pictures of philosophers as a collection. No one knew what they looked like, and it seemed like there was little interest in knowing that, even amongst themselves. Admittedly there had been some interviews. Bryan Magee did a really famous set of interviews in the seventies, which had some pictures. Some of them were published in a very interesting book. But I started to realize the photographs were really of an unrecorded tribe.
More here.
