Interview by Julian Baggini

Many people find philosophers fascinating. What makes Steve Pyke's interest different is that his focus – quite literally – is not on what is going on inside their craniums, but on the outside of those heads.

Pyke's portraits of philosophers, first published as a book in 1993, has become the definitive visual record of the post-war generation of (mostly Anglo-American) philosophers, as they approached the ends of their careers. Twenty-odd years later, many of them are no longer with us: Elizabeth Anscombe, A J Ayer, Isaiah Berlin , Donald Davidson, Jacques Derrida – not to mention the many more from E to Z.

Pyke's portraits are instantly recognisable. The vast majority are shot with the camera just inches from the subject's face, resulting in a sometimes harsh, uncompromising, and, as one sitter, Michael Frede, said of his own picture, “unflattering” view. Not surprisingly, some of his subjects did not like the results. “I felt it was not altogether just,” said Michael Dummett. If the aim was to make him beautiful, he could be right, but if it was to make his face interesting, Dummett has no grounds for complaint.

Twenty-odd years after the first collection, Pyke has returned with a new series capturing the next generation of philosophers. The shooting is complete, and the pictures will be exhibited in New York in the autumn, with a book scheduled to follow in 2006.

What led Pyke to become so interested in philosophers, and how have his meetings with them shaped his own thought? I discussed these questions with him over croque monsieur in London 's Soho, when a jet-lagged Pyke was briefly visiting from his adopted home of New York .

“My idea of philosophy was that it was a completely dense area that had no relation to my life whatsoever,” said Pyke, describing his own preconceptions prior to a life-changing shoot with A J Ayer for Tatler in 1988.

“I was told I'd have about ten minutes or so with him and it developed into about four or five hours of talking. We spoke about all sorts of things. We spoke about the war, I remember, and his time in Europe in the thirties and what the political environment was like there then, which was really interesting. The great thing about A J Ayer was that you could speak to him on all sorts of different levels. He gave you pathways into philosophy. Even though I wasn't with him for that long, he was very open.”

Pyke several times mentions the openness of the philosophers he snapped, and that was clearly what impressed him most about Ayer. “This was towards the end of his life and he was incredibly open, maybe more so because of the point he was at. It was very stimulating being around him in all sorts of different ways.”

The Ayer shoot proved to be an inspiration. “I thought what would be really interesting would be to meet and photograph maybe ten other philosophers. It didn't transpire like that.”

To give some shape to the project, Pyke decided that he needed some sort of guidelines. So he spoke to Ted Honderich, who suggested some people Pyke might like to start off with. Then he asked each of his subjects for the names of ten other people they thought he should photograph. If the same name came up three times, Pyke would add it to his list.

“Certain people came up all the time, like Quine, Rawls and Chomsky.” But what surprised Pyke was how much these lists varied. “I took it that it would be a given who the leading lights in philosophy are. I didn't realise within philosophy there are all these different areas.” Pyke was discovering that philosophy is as tribal and fragmented as any other walk of life.

“Very quickly this list of people developed to about 30. I didn't really waste any time. I took three or four weeks out and as soon as I got a yes I'd go and photograph them.” All this was completely self-funded. Pyke was driven by his own interest and had no commission to underwrite the cost of his labours.

“The reason it grabbed me was the first four or five philosophers I met were all really interesting. You don't necessarily get on with people. I meet and photograph people all the time, maybe two or three portrait sessions a week. I just found them a very stimulating group of people and it seemed to me an interesting collection of people to photograph. It struck me that nobody had done it before.”

The project put Pyke in a very distinctive position. He was meeting and talking with the greatest philosophers in the world, but was not reading much of their work. “I was working on quite tight deadlines each day,” he explains. “It gave me about an hour or so for each person, which is not a lot of time. There was no opportunity at that point to read, and that wasn't really why I was there. I soon realised that I was putting together an archive of portraits of people who philosophers felt were the leading lights.”

There were some words to accompany the images, however. Pyke asked all the sitters to provide a brief statement of their philosophy of up to one hundred words. A few refused, and one such refusal was included as the entry. H L A Hart wrote, “To be frank, I think the idea of a 50-100 word summary is an absurd idea … I advise you to drop it.”

“The basis of my understanding of philosophy comes from what was put back in,” says Pyke, “the fifty words that people have actually said about their work, and in some cases, very little else.”

What is interesting is that, cumulatively, these summaries actually do give you a pretty good idea of what philosophy at the time was about. Certain themes recur: seeking conceptual clarity, uncovering fundamental assumptions, use of rigorous logical method, and so on.

“The idea I had from the very beginning was that this could demystify,” says Pyke. “It kind of debunked the myth I had in my mind that philosophy was so dense and had no relation at all to my life. In lots of ways, the idea that people have their own philosophy is completely separate from academic philosophy. But in lots of ways I've found it's not.”

For his new series of portraits, Pyke found that the centre of power had shifted. In Britain , he was making fewer trips to Oxford and Cambridge , and overall there were more shoots on the other side of the Atlantic .

“What's interesting now is that they seem to be a lot more younger. What happened before was that you'd go to college; you'd then take a while to get a position; you wouldn't get your first book out until you were 40, 45; you wouldn't expect to have an impact for another ten years; so you're talking about people approaching 60 before they become in any way well-known. This time around, a lot of people are of the younger generation of philosophers. There are many more bright lights that have been put to me than the first time around.”

Pyke followed exactly the same method for selecting his subjects as before, and he lets me in on some of the names most mentioned. Kit Fine, Bob Stalnaker, Richard Rorty (one of several he missed first time around), Barry Stroud, Joseph Raz, Harty Field and Tyler Burge are all people who came up again and again. And of the younger philosophers, Timothy Williamson stood out from the crowd.

Apart from their openness, the other characteristic Pyke thought was typical of his subjects was their pragmatism. “A number of them, when you started to talk about other philosophers, would say something like they had wasted an hour reading this person's book twenty years ago. There seems to be a lot of intolerance. Really what that's about is the feeling that time is short.”

Pyke himself has no academic background. Born in Leicester in 1957, at that time one of Britain 's industrial heartlands, he left school at 16 and forged his own path. The culmination of that career to date was his recent appointment as staff photographer at the New Yorker , a coveted position previously held by only one man – the great Richard Avedon. This came after another great achievement: an MBE for services to the arts, one of the Queen's birthday honours bestowed in 2003.

In one way, however, his career has something in common with the philosophers he has worked with.

“I chose my path as a photographer because for me it was a means of self-expression, and perhaps a way of understanding more about myself and the world that I live in.”

His photographs, like philosophy, are also to do with revealing reality in some ways. Pyke believes his pictures are concerned not so much with illuminating the inner nature of the sitter, but with providing a record of a particular meeting.

“What happens is that there's a conversation between two people and the camera will capture some sort of idea of what was going on between those two people. It's not just a likeness. What I look for [when selecting the shot to use] is some sort of distillation of what I remember that encounter was like.”

Do we, however, learn anything about the philosophers and their ideas from looking at Pyke's portraits?

“I think – especially when you get to an age – the way that we think and the way that we live our lives is reflected in the way our faces look. Whether you're open or whether you're closed, it's there in the face.”  

Steve Pyke's new series of Philosophers photographed in 2003-4 will be shown at Flowers New York Gallery from 10 October to 10 November . A book is expected to be published in the autumn of 2006.

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