In 1988, English photographer Steve Pyke — who became staff photographer at The New Yorker in 2004, following the death of Richard Avedon (1934-2004) — received an editorial commission to photograph the renowned British philosopher Sir Alfred Jules Ayer, author of Language, Truth and Logic, a volume widely considered a classic of analytical thought. Whilst warned that he would have just ten minutes to photograph Ayer, the session stretched into several hours of talk of a kind and order of openness that nothing in Pyke’s experience had prepared him for, writes Arthur C. Danto. 

‘Based on my own experience, what ever Ayer’s official limits on the topic of metaphysics, there must have been so much thought, wit, practical wisdom, wide knowledge and stunning and clarity in his everyday conversation that Pyke, who had seen life, knew the world, and was already an artist of considerable achievement, had never before met its like, suggests Danto. ‘He had not read much if any philosophy, But such, I surmise, was the range, depth, and charm of Ayer’s discourse that it sufficed to open Pyke to philosophers as a species,’ and marked the beginning of a twenty-year project simply titled Philosophers, which will be on show at Flowers, London from 8 September.

That first portrait is marked by the unflinching characteristics that have become a signature of Pyke’s oeuvre; a high-contrast black-and-white composition, with his sitters face filling the square frame of his Rolleiflex camera, against a the neutral background. By 1991, Pyke had produced a series of seventy-eight portraits of philosophers, and published his first book Philosophers (Dewi Lewis), whilst today the series has expanded to over two-hundred portraits.

Above Slavoj Zizek, November 21, 2007, New York. (©Steve Pyke/Courtesy Flowers, London).

From a working class background, Pyke says, ‘I was definitely intimidated when I began photographing philosophers. Ayer, Berlin, Anscombe, and Quine were intellectual heavyweights in anyone’s book and this was utterly apparent to me when I met them.’

‘My parents once cautioned me, recalling St. Paul’s warning to “beware of vain philosophy...” Alas, I fell for philosophy anyway, and perhaps for vain philosophy,’ says Rae Langton, author of Kantian Humility: Our Ignorance of Things in Themselves, and Sexual Solipsism: Philosophical Essays on Pornography and Objectification, who Pyke photographed in 2003, her jet-black hair blending with the black of the background, heightening the focus on her eyes, whilst the enigmatic softness of the photograph suggests that Pyke has captured Langton deep in animated philosophical debate. 

Whilst Pyke remains aware of the way his life was suppose to have unfolded, events conspired to alter that expected path, with his acquaintance with philosophers allowing him to identify with aspects of their journeys. ‘Whereas philosophy at first seemed imposing and foreign, I now recognise that both the philosopher and the photographer face similar struggles in creating a body of creative work over time.’

‘I hate philosophy, but I cannot find peace if I do not get rid of a philosophical problem. Philosophy is for me like women: they are impossible, but it is even more difficult without them,’ says Slavoj Zizek, the Slovenian philosopher and critical theorist, whose intense gaze connects directly with the viewer in Pyke’s striking 2007 portrait. For the new generation of philosopher, like Zizek, Pyke’s work is well known, therefore the expectations  that they arrive with for their sitting is very different from those who first sat for the photographer over twenty years ago. ‘Not only have they seen the first book, but the first book contains most of their mentors and many of their intellectual role models,’ say Pyke, ‘They have a sense of familiarity with my work that the subjects of the first series lacked.’ 

Above Judith Thomson, April 14, 2010, Boston. (©Steve Pyke/Courtesy Flowers, London).

Like the portrait of Zizek, the American moral philosopher and metaphysician Judith Jarvis Thompson makes direct eye contact with Pyke’s lens in his 2010 portrait, a session marked by Thompson’s repeated question, Why Philosophers? When Pyke photographed Ayer in 1988 — a year before his death — he was already frail, he didn’t speak as much about philosophy, as about his life recollects Pyke, ‘But the way he spoke about his life astounded and fascinated me,’ and as the philosopher and photographer conversed it was clear to Pyke that he wanted more of this type of interaction. 

‘Most of what analytical philosophers talked about among themselves was language,’ suggests Danto, ‘but the particular social group to which Ayer belonged was also characterised by a sparkling urbanity that was unique, in my experience at least, and what Pyke was exposed to in his meeting with Ayer was a kind of salon discourse.’

Whilst Pyke’s work is not typological in nature, it is hard not to draw comparisons with August Sander’s (1876-1964) People of the 20th Century, but what separates the community of philosophers from Sander’s communities, is what Pyke calls, the ‘peculiar way in which philosophers relate to each other, their mentors, and their peers that bonds this community together.’ Looking at this series of work, one could consider them a collection, something that clearly interests Pyke, but it could also viewed in a more anthropological context as a tribe. The Philosophy Tribe, is made up of thinkers, which in Pyke’s view is an honourable profession, deserved of a wider audience, ‘My series “outs” these thinkers,’ placing them on more ‘people’s radars.’

‘My own sense is that the human face and the camera, as it has evolved, were made for one another,’ writes Danto, ‘The face is in constant movement, and in the course of its ceaseless modulation transmits, almost cinematically, a series of disclosures of its owner’s inner being,’ an inner being that we experience clearly in Pyke’s portraits.

Philosophers is at Flowers (Cork Street), London from 8 September until 1 October 2011. A new edition of Philosphers is published by Oxford University Press.