How to Understand Fiction in Photography

Abstract This chapter explores the category of fiction (as opposed to nonfiction) in photography. Philosophical work about fiction in this medium has been restricted to discussing whether photographs can or cannot represent fictional entities, but there is virtually no debate on the fiction/nonfiction distinction in photography. This distinction has been theorized with respect to literature or film where classificatory practices are well established. In photography, however, intuitions regarding what counts as a fictional work—as opposed to, say, what counts as a photograph that represents fictional objects—are messier. This chapter, therefore, poses these questions: (1) does the distinction between fiction and nonfiction apply to photography in any informative sense? If it does, (2) do these categories behave in a similar way as they do in other media? Following the Genre Theory of Fiction (GTF), the chapter proposes that fiction is an active genre in photography, but its extension is not what many readers might expect. Moreover, these categories display peculiarities derived from the nature of the medium which makes it more accurate to talk about factual and non-factual photography. The analysis provided shows that the GTF better explains the case of fictional photography than competing theories of fiction.