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.

Pictured: Sir A. J. Ayer London 1988, David Lewis Princeton 1990

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.

AK: Yeah, nowadays we’re required to have staff photos up on our university and professional websites. But I suppose before the internet…

SP: It’s true, and sometimes they weren’t even photographs. I remember when I was at Harvard, the Philosophy Department had paintings or drawings on the walls. There were no photographs as I remember.

AK: So, you got really interested in this unrecorded tribe and decided eventually to do a second series. How did the second series of portraits differ from the first series?

SP: When I decided to do a second series, I was working in New York. One of the first people suggested to me, and the first portrait I did for that series, was Anthony Appiah. That was emblematic of the most notable difference. The first series had a very noticeable imbalance in gender, age, and race. Most were older white men. But the second time around was more diverse. Many of the philosophers were also younger, certainly closer in age to me, and we shared more cultural and social references. So we could sit around, talk, and drink… we used to party.

People like Delia Graff [Fara], Jason Stanley, David Chalmers, Stalnaker, Kripke, and Stephen Neale. Whoever would come to town, we’d hang out. I became very good friends with a number of people in the philosophy community.

Saul Kripke made a habit of coming to my photography shows. I had a private viewing of my Pictures of the Dead. It was pretty weird to have Saul Kripke come to things like that, but there he was.

The experience photographing the second series was much more social than the first series had been. I saw a lot more of the philosophers socially the second time around.

Pictured: Kwame Anthony Appiah NYC 2003, Jason Stanley Oxford 2003

AK: It’s so interesting to hear you talk about this. You have an outsider’s perspective on what philosophy culture is like, on what philosophers look like and what we are like, how we comport ourselves and how we interact with each other. And you see how we change over time. It reminds me of families. People who see their children all the time tend not to notice how much they’ve changed because it only happens incrementally. But people who see, say, their young cousins only once every few years are often shocked at how much they’ve grown and changed. I think we philosophers are a bit like the parents in this case—changes often happen very gradually, so we don’t notice them unless we take a step back. Doing these series puts you in something more like the cousin’s position, one where you can see immediately how dramatic the differences are.

SP: The analogy you make to family is nice. It really is a family, the family of philosophers. And as with any family, there’s a lot of infighting. Maybe more than most families, because for you there are real philosophical points to be making.

When I made the first series, one of the things I was most amazed by was how intolerant philosophers seemed. I realized that this happened because their time was precious, and to have spent time with this “child,” their philosophy, to have nurtured it and brought it through, to have written a paper, had it accepted and published, and then to have somebody deny what they thought…

AK: It’s true, our work is often very personal to us.

SP: Yes, and I’ve not noticed it appear in the same way seen that in anything else. It hasn’t existed for me outside of academia.

AK: You don’t think that’s true in the Arts?

SP: Not in the same way. In the arts, a lot of the judging is outside of your tribe: curators, galleries, even museums. Philosophers are judged more from within. Also, much of philosophy is not for public consumption, or at least, it sort of is but sort of isn’t. You’re ultimately making things for your own family and they’re the ones judging you. The Arts function in a different way.

AK: Hah, yeah, it is tough and sometimes quite painful to be judged by people you grow very close to, who become part of that family. And there really are quasi-familial lineages. And there’s even a website that traces those lineages, defined as who was whose student. These families can grow to be huge, since certain influential figures (many included in your portraits!) had lots of students, who had their own students, who had their students, and so on.

SP: That’s fascinating. And it’s true, Elizabeth Anscombe spoke for a lot of the time about her memories of Wittgenstein, and Ayer talked about Ryle. But then there are literal families in philosophy, too: philosophy spouses and philosopher parents of philosopher children. There’s not anything unique about that; lots of children follow parents into a trade.

AK: And you’ve done some portraits of those families, too.

SP: Yes, I photographed Anscombe and Geach, Stuart Hampshire and Nancy Cartwright, the Churchlands, the Kitchers, and the Harmans. I also did portraits of both Peter and Galen Strawson, but Peter had passed away by the time I photographed Galen. Whenever pairs like this came to the portrait sessions together, they were very keen to be photographed together. And so I’d photograph those as double portraits if I could.

Sometimes people also brought their children. Of course, it was never the men that came with their children. It was always women, trying to make the time to meet with me for a portrait. I ended up photographing Hampshire and Cartwright that way. They had a child, too, who is in one of the pictures. Actually, he insisted that I photograph her, although she wasn’t on my list. You see, he was very early on in the first series, so my list wasn’t long yet. He was somebody that Ayer gave me. They had both served in the Secret Service during the war.

Pictured: Elizabeth Anscombe and Peter Geach Cambridge 1990, Nancy Cartwright and Stuart Hampshire Oxford 1990, Stuart Hampshire Oxford 1990, Patricia and Phillip Kitcher NY 2003, Gilbert and Elizabeth Harman NYC 2010

AK: Wow, I had no idea. I wonder, do you find the double portrait sessions different from the individual sessions?

SP: When you photograph people face-to-face, the way that I do, the experience becomes a very focused one for both me and the sitter, and the camera lends additional seriousness and formality. But that effect isn’t as strong in double portraits. The sitters become foils for each other. They can joke amongst themselves, and they can play to the camera in a way they probably wouldn’t do if they were alone.

Although sometimes they become more formal. The Churchlands, for example, became even more formal and self-conscious for their double portrait than they had been when they were apart. They were more controlling than average in their portrait sessions, and that became even more accentuated when they sat together.

AK: I want to ask some more about the portraits in general. In your interview with Jason Stanley, which was published with the second series, you said that portrait photography isn’t about capturing essences: “I’m not sure that describing a true face gets us anywhere, there isn’t such a thing.” What do you think portrait photography is about capturing?

SP: It’s about capturing a meeting, the connection between the sitter and portraitist. Of course, there are many different, valid ways of making a portrait. But I think gesture, spontaneity, is an important element in a portrait. It might seem like there are not that many gestures in the two series, but that’s not true. Derrida’s portrait is a kiss he is blowing to the viewer. It was the last frame of the session, and he was aware of this.

Why would he choose to do that? We didn’t speak the same language, so we had to find a different language and that happened very naturally. Gesture played a big part in this, not just in my directing him but also in his responses.

Pictured: Jacques Derrida Paris 1990, Susan Hurley Oxford 1990

AK: Do you feel that you’re now done with photographing philosophers, or is there anything you’re planning for us in the future?

SP: I’m actually interested in making a new series, and I’ve recently applied for funding for it. (The first two were self-funded, you see.) The interesting thing is that, if or when I photograph the next series, there will be yet another shift of relationship. I may well be older than most of them.

I was about thirty years old when I photographed my first philosophers, which coincided with having children. I was thirty-one when I photographed Ayer. Most of the philosophers in that series were quite old. Many reflected the thirties and forties—people like Nelson Goodman, John Rawls, Herbert Hart, Quine, Carl Hempel. Some of those people had escaped Germany or other parts of Europe. It really was a great time to photograph this family of philosophers.

The pre-war generation were dying out. I remember Ayer saying to me, “You know, you really should photograph some of these people.” And I thought “OK, I’ll photograph the world’s ten leading philosophers,” not having any understanding of how the field worked. I didn’t know about the various families within the family of philosophy.

For the second series, I was about the same age as many of the philosophers. We were at roughly the same stage of life and had real friendships and social relationships.

AK: Well, I personally hope that you do complete a third series. It will be very interesting to see how and whether your relationship to the philosophers changes your portraits, or whether today’s philosophers are more image-conscious. Plus, something is just very satisfying about threes, and satisfyingly symmetrical about doing a third series in your case especially.

SP: Yes, exactly. It’ll represent three different generations. It will be an important document if I get to do it.

Pictured: Sir Peter Strawson Oxford 1990, Galen Strawson 2003

Another thing that will change is that there won’t be the same kind of paper trail. As I said, Ayer gave me some names early on. He was the one who gave me Richard Hare, Bernard Williams, Stuart Hampshire, and Peter Strawson—who was an unusual person. He also gave me Ted Honderich, because Ted worked with him and he said Ted could give me more names. But what’s interesting is that he had this little phone book that was falling apart, with all his numbers really minutely written down inside. And he wrote down the numbers of those people on an envelope for me. It was an envelope from a letter to him. I’ve still got it! I’ve still got all the letters.

AK: All the letters?

SP: Yes. With each portrait I ask the philosopher to write fifty words explaining why they have spent a lifetime studying philosophy. The letters were usually handwritten and I saved them all.

AK: Wow, that’s incredible that you kept everything.

SP: Yes, I even kept my diaries, with the lists of appointments. Everything is in my personal archive. Back then, there were no emails, so it all had to be written by hand and mailed. So I’d write to Donald Davidson, and the letter would have to go from London to California, and then he had to look at it, read it, decide what he was going to say, write a letter, and send it back. That’s a month right there—if he chose to turn it around quickly.

Iris Murdoch wrote less than fifty words. She wrote the first draft, and then a month or two later, she wrote me the second, contradicting the first one. Then she wrote me a third one, which contradicted the second one and returned to the first. And they’re really interesting because you can see that they’re clearly from the same batch of notepaper.

Steve Pyke’s diary entries, May 26, 1990, May 1990, June 14, 1990

AK: Ha! That’s great. Do you have any plans for what to do with that archive?

SP: Yes, I’m in the process of trying to place the entire archive somewhere. I have been busy organizing and collating my work, including portrait sessions that I’ve never had the chance to really properly look at, and I’m trying to place the various projects with the appropriate institutions. The philosophy archive is a very important collection that has to be dealt with properly. Right now, it sits in a box in my studio. Not just the letters, but all the negatives of all the photo sessions, the prints, the exhibition posters, all of it.

AK: It’s fascinating to think about the handwriting, too. Something gestural is captured in a person’s physical handwriting, right? It’s a different window on spontaneity and gesture, captured in a different medium.

SP: Yes, handwriting seems to be a dying art, but I still enjoy making marks, sending the letters. Nowadays, most people write on a computer, you edit it there. But they wrote their first books by hand in the thirties and forties.

Quine’s letter is amazing. It’s very beautiful handwriting. It’s completely seamless, no paragraphs, one long piece of writing in India ink on a beautiful piece of Harvard stationery paper. It’s a beautiful item.

Pictured: Letter from Quine, Cambridge 1990, Willard Van Orman Quine Harvard 1990

AK: There’s something so nice about the tactile, physical quality of those kinds of things.

SP: Oh, yeah. I love it.

AK: Speaking of handwriting, hands are also a recurring subject in your photography. Your book I Could Read the Sky opens with a photograph of hands and closes with handprints, and near the middle is a full two-page, forty-photograph spread of hands. These photos and your portraits are often quite stylistically similar. Do you think that you’re doing the same kind of thing with these photographs as with traditional portraits?

SP: Painters are told to avoid hands when they’re students because they’re so difficult to paint. And part of the reason they’re difficult to paint is because they’re moving all the time. But it’s different for a photographer. You get something that’s often very spontaneous. Hands and the way they move tell a lot about a person, even in the still moment of a photograph.

People are so conscious of their hands. I have on my wall here the original composite of that large spread you mention from the book, Hands 1993–1996. They’re portraits of the hands of people that I met over a weekend in the west of Ireland. I asked them all if I could photograph their hands. I said they could do whatever they wanted with their hands, but they would only get one frame. Some people’s hands are open and facing upward, others are cupped or clasped. It all depends on the sitter. You can tell that people say a lot through their hands, so hands for me are always interesting to photograph.

I’ve done thousands and thousands of portrait sessions. I’ve photographed murderers’ hands, and I’ve photographed babies’ hands. The other day, I was looking at my portrait session with Kurt Vonnegut from maybe twenty years ago in New York. And the final frame is one where I’d asked to photograph his hands.

AK: One common thread here is gesture and spontaneity. Traditional portraits of faces as well as portraits of hands, for you, share this feature and interest. It’s funny, now that we’re talking about hands so much, I notice even over Zoom how much I talk with my hands and I’m getting a little self-conscious!

SP: I like it! I do it too; we’re doing the same thing. I think it draws people in.

AK: [laughs] Thanks, that’s comforting. I was also wondering about black and white: In the preface to that same book, the art critic John Berger writes that black and white photography “remind you of this search for what can’t be seen, for what’s missing; never do they pretend to be complete.” He sees black and white photos as a search for the invisible. I’d have thought that the power of black and white photography was actually to clear away distractions (like color) to focus the eye on what’s left (like contour and composition). What do you think? Why do you do so much of your photography in black and white?

SP: That’s true, of course. But I think black and white images can sometimes allude to more than color, and that’s what John was getting at. Another aspect of this is that I’m a self-taught photographer, and a lot of my education—if you like—came from libraries of photography books. My photography is influenced by the great twentieth century photographers: Walker Evans, Paul Strand, Diane Arbus, Dorothea Lange, and Berenice Abbott. These are primarily black and white photographers. My studio wall is full of black and white portraits of children by other photographers; I’m surrounded by black and white photography.

Sometimes I wonder about this. I’m sure I can smell in my dreams, but I can’t remember color in my dreams, only black and white.

AK: That’s very interesting. Do you ever consider shooting more color?

SP: A lot more of my recent photography is color work. I’d never photograph a portrait session now without shooting color. When I started photography, through music, I photographed a lot of bands. That was in the first ten years of my career, from around 1980–1990, and I’m currently working on a new book of this early music work. But most of that imagery is black and white. It would have been nice to have shot more color. I’m making up for that today. In fact, I’m currently involved in photographing Irish writers for a project that has been going since 1983, which I’m completing now for a book to be published in 2026. And that one will contain more color photographs.

Pictured: John Rawls Harvard 1990, Jacques Derrida Paris 1990

AK: What about digital photography? You’re a film photographer, but I wonder what you think about film versus digital photography, especially when digital cameras and editing software seem able to produce results that look identical to film photographs.

SP: For me, I prefer to shoot in film. The first camera I bought in 1980 is the same camera I use now, a Rolleiflex. It was built the year I was born, in 1957. I photographed the Philosophers, the Astronauts series, everything in this past 40+ years. It has a fixed lens, so if I want to shoot closer, I have to move closer. I like the feel of this camera. I like the mechanical load on of a camera, the winding on. I like the work of it. I reduce my choices because the portrait, for me, is less about the technique and much more about the interaction between sitter and photographer. You can shoot color with it too! [laughs] That’s just what I’m doing with my Irish writers series, using film and color.

AK: Right, and digital photography seems to be on the opposite end of that simplicity and physicality spectrum. This also feels related to the tactile aspects of the letters we were discussing earlier. The camera or a letter—its physicality makes it feel very present.

SP: Yes, that’s the same reason I like totally one-off photography prints. These are all unique documents. Photography prints have that feature because a lot of deliberation goes into them. A Rolleiflex roll of film has twelve frames. It’s a calendar that I’m aware of and keeping track of as I’m shooting and also when I edit. A few weeks ago, I went back to the session I did with Alasdair MacIntyre. I can remember each frame—and that picture session was thirty-five years ago. But that’s because each frame is a choice I made very deliberately, and I remember each one. The frames tell a story, the narrative of that session.

With digital, I don’t have that. You can scatter-shoot, which you can’t do with film. I have shot digital photography in the past, and it didn’t feel right for me, I didn’t really get it. My wife has a digital camera, and about ten years ago, we had a couple of shoots with the New Yorker. I photographed the musician Scott Walker on my Rolleiflex and I also shot some digital on the side. But the digital images didn’t speak to me. Shooting more actually gave me less. The aesthetic disappeared.

AK: How do you feel about all the filters designed to make digital photos look more like analog film? This was huge on Instagram for a while: square, often with borders, with many black and white options, and tweakable settings that would lend photos that air of age and artiness.

SP: I do use Photoshop and Lightroom to edit with now. My analog negatives are scanned, and I work on them on the computer in a similar way to how I used to work in the darkroom. I can make a portrait darker, more moody, perhaps in the same way. But they remain uncropped, the same images made in the Rolleiflex.

Those raw, fogged edges in older photographs were to show that the photo you’re seeing is a full frame, and that there’s no cropping. Diane Arbus’s photos have that edge, and apart from its aesthetic, it’s to prove that she’s showing you everything. If it’s not there, then it’s a crop. A lot of people can’t tell the difference between those fake frames and the real thing, but I can see it. My pictures always have that edge, because they’re the full frame. And I crop and edit, too, but I set up my perspective and composition in-camera, not afterwards. I edit before I press the button.

The process of making the picture is just as important as the result. I deliberate over a portrait very differently when using a camera phone. If I use a camera phone, it’s usually for reference material. I don’t give it the same amount of time; I use it more like a sketchbook.

That said, there can still be a spontaneity about a phone image that I like. I can catch things that are interesting in different ways. If I’m shooting on the Rolleiflex, I have to be in control of light. But I don’t need any control over light with the camera phone because it photographs even when it’s very dark.

You could say that each frame is precious. When you say something is precious, it’s often understood as something negative. I don’t think about it that way. I guess I am quite precious about my pictures.

AK: I wonder if you feel that way about your subjects, too. You’ve collected a lot of photographs of different people: musicians, astronauts, writers, film directors. Is there anything different, or even precious, about the philosophers versus the others?

SP: It’s true, I collect genealogies like this—families, as we’ve been saying. But yes, the philosophers were different. I definitely felt that I’d entered a club. Or as we mentioned earlier, I believe it’s a family. And there is love and jealousy in families. Lots of things go on in families, and that’s true for the philosophy family.

And as for preciousness, I’ll tell you a story. When I was making the second series, I tended to call the philosophers my philosophers. The series meant a lot to me, and I’d identified with them—in a really loving way. I put this book together, and the people inside were my philosophers. I was talking once with Delia Graff [Fara]. We always got along so well, but she always used to take me to task, tease me. I mentioned my philosophers and she said, “Oh, they’re your philosophers now, are they?” She said, “Actually, they’re my philosophers!” Ha! Delia never really let me get away with anything.

AK: Well, I look forward to sharing this interview with my philosophers!

SP: Yes, exactly. You should, they’re your family.

Edited by Alex King