Ostas talks about photography. The history of philosophical thinking about photography is permeated by worry about photography's status as an expressive aesthetic medium--that is, photography's manner of being artistic in the sense of the other arts. As Walter Benn Michaels points out in his recent essays on art, photography, and philosophy, a specific idea of the photographic camera often undergirds this philosophical worry: the camera is a mechanized, automated instrument that in the philosopher's mind can become independently generative or generating of photographs. The worries about photography's expressive powers thus stem from this conception of the camera as vitally animated by the ability to become the agent in the act of the making of a photograph.