Understanding Pictures

Examining the kinds of visual and cultural skills viewers need to have to understand pictures, the author explains why pictures can be understood out of their cultural and historical context, as well as how visual images can convey messages other forms of media cannot.

There are many ways to picture the world - Australian `x-ray'' pictures, cubist collages, Amerindian split-style figures, and pictures in two-point perspective each draw attention to different features of what they represent. The premise of Understanding Pictures is that this diversity is the central fact with which a theory of figurative pictures must reckon.Lopes argues that identifying pictures'' subjects is akin to recognizing objects whose appearances have changed over time. He develops a schema for categorizing the different ways pictures represent--the different kinds of meaning they have--and he contends that depiction''s epistemic value lies in its representational diversity. He also offers a novel account of the phenomenology of pictorial experience, comparing pictures to visual prostheses like mirrors and binoculars.The book concludes with a discussion of works of art which have made pictorial meaning their theme, demonstrating the importance of the issues this book raises for understanding the aesthetics of pictures.