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Image

artifact that depicts or records visual perception

An image or picture is an artifact that depicts or records visual perception, for example a two-dimensional picture, that has a similar appearance to some subject – usually a physical object or a person, thus providing a depiction of it.

An image is so full of information that ten thousands words would not add up to it. ~ George Sarton
CONTENT : A - F , G - L , M - R , S - Z , See also , External links

Quotes

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Quotes are arranged alphabetically by author

A - F

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Similar to body and voice – and different from writing – the picture involves a representation which produces an impression of presence. This presence occupies an absence that is filled with a picture. In the iconic presence, absence is marked. Without denying the absence of what they represent, pictures offer absence as presence. The mask is just such a picture. It creates iconic presence by placing another face on the body. In the case of a dead person it restores the missing face. In the case of an actor, the face itself turns into a mask, and thus conveys a picture. ~ Hans Belting
 
Akin to the monuments of fallen despots in more recent times, religious pictures fell victim to iconoclasms directed against false or misused images (i.e. idols). In Judaism and Islam, the ban on images pertained only to their religious use and was directed against the visual practices of other populations; in Judaism against an older pictorial tradition (Uehlinger 2003) and in Islam against the use of images in Christian churches (Fowden 2014).
In the context of Christianity the use of images was central to the project of becoming a world religion and of eschewing its Jewish legacy. ~ Hans Belting
  • Iconic presence is presence in and as a picture. The physical presence of a picture in our world refers to the symbolic presence which it depicts. Similar to body and voice – and different from writing – the picture involves a representation which produces an impression of presence. This presence occupies an absence that is filled with a picture. In the iconic presence, absence is marked. Without denying the absence of what they represent, pictures offer absence as presence. The mask is just such a picture. It creates iconic presence by placing another face on the body. In the case of a dead person it restores the missing face. In the case of an actor, the face itself turns into a mask, and thus conveys a picture. If “iconic difference”(Boehm 1994, 29ff.) is a hermeneutic concern, iconic presence is an anthropological issue.
    In the context of religion, pictures represent deities who have no direct presence in the physical world; these deities are not held to be absent (let alone non-existent), but in need of a picture in order to become visible. In primal religions, living bodies transform into apparitions through dance and voice. In the Christian tradition, visual artefacts behaved as living bodies that wept, worked miracles, and were carried through “their” town, as if they could walk by themselves
  • Akin to the monuments of fallen despots in more recent times, religious pictures fell victim to iconoclasms directed against false or misused images (i.e. idols). In Judaism and Islam, the ban on images pertained only to their religious use and was directed against the visual practices of other populations; in Judaism against an older pictorial tradition (Uehlinger 2003) and in Islam against the use of images in Christian churches (Fowden 2014).
    In the context of Christianity the use of images was central to the project of becoming a world religion and of eschewing its Jewish legacy. The “true” portrait of Christ, a late phenomenon after the Council of Chalcedon (451), possessed a special evidence that was appropriated by competing theological schools in divergent ways. Pictures were then upgraded as originals. Iconic presence began to compete with the word in textual revelation. Already the notion of the Mother of God (Theotokos) at the Council of Ephesus (431) enhanced the doctrine of the two natures of Christ in one human face. Islamic theology returned to the verbal revelation of God. The Qur’an has been introduced as a book which God has sent to his prophet. With the Islamic rejection of Jesus as the son of God, the visibility of God became taboo once more.
    Aniconism is a picture theory under reverse conditions and usually reflects a negative experience with pictures. In the Reformation, text and picture competed with one other as different religious media, in a turn again Catholic visual politics. The Counter-Reformation above all used the weapons of a re-catholicized visual politics that transformed the space of the church into a theatre of heaven. The church directed this strategy against the private reading of the bible propagated by the Reformation. In modern secular society, religious pictures lost their old credibility, which also damaged their status as works of art. So even within the same religious tradition pictures were subject to historical change.
  • I believe that robotic thinking helps precision of psychological thought, and will continue to help it until psychophysiology is so far advanced that an image is nothing other than a neural event, and object constancy is obviously just something that happens in the brain.
    • Edwin Boring (1946). Mind and Mechanism; Cited in: Melford E. Spiro (1992) Anthropological Other Or Burmese Brother?: Studies in Cultural Analysis. p. 68.
  • A picture is a poem without words.
    • Cornificius, Anet. ad Her., 4. 28. In Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 576-77.
  • While the film Life of Christ was rolling past before my eyes I was mentally visualizing the gods, Shri Krishna, Shri Ramachandra their Gokul and Ayodhya.. I was gripped by a strange spell. I bought another ticket and saw the film again. This time I felt my imagination taking shape in the screen. Could this really happen? Could we the sons of India, ever be able to see Indian images on the screen. The whole night passed in this mental agony.
  • Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image (Hebrew פסל) or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.
    • Exodus 20:4

"Unbearable Weight” (2003)

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Susan Bordo, “Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture and the Body”, Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2003

 
Where did Ann get the idea that any vestige of fat must be banished from her body? Most likely, it wasn’t from comparing herself to other real women, but to those computer-generated torsos-in ads for anti-cellulite cream and the like-whose hips and thighs and buttocks are smooth and seamless as gently sloping sand-dunes. No actual person has a body like that. But that doesn’t matter-because our expectations, our desires, our judgments about bodies, are becoming dictated by the digital. When was the last time you actually saw a wrinkle-or cellulite-or a drooping jowl-or a pucker or a pocket-in a magazine or video image? Ten years ago Harper’s magazine printed the invoice Esquire had received for retouching a cover picture of Michelle Pfeiffer. The picture was accompanied by copy that read: ”What Michelle Pfeiffer needs … is absolutely nothing.” What Pfeiffer’s picture alone needed to appear on that cover was actually $1,525 worth of chin trimming, complexion cleansing, neck softening, line removal, and other assorted touches.
 
Now, in 2003, virtually every celebrity image you see-in the magazines, in the videos, and sometimes even in the movies-has been digitally modified. Virtually every image. Let that sink in. Don’t just let your mind passively receive it. Confront its implications. This is not just a matter of deception-boring old stuff, which ads have traded in from their beginnings. This is perceptual pedagogy, How to Interpret Your Body 101. These images are teaching us how to see. Filtered, smoothed, polished, softened, sharpened, re-arranged. And passing. Digital creations, visual cyborgs, teaching us what to expect from flesh and blood. Training our perception in what's a defect and what is normal.
Are we sophisticated enough to know the images are not “real”? Does it matter? There are no disclaimers on the ads: “Warning: This body is generated by a computer. Don’t expect your thighs to look this way.”
 
One of the hardest challenges I faced, in presenting these ideas at conferences and public lectures, was getting medical professionals and academics to take cultural imagery seriously. Most clinicians, unaccustomated to viewing images as anything other than “mere fashion,” saw cultural interpretation as somehow minimizing the seriousness of eating disorders. I insisted-an argument I laid out explicitly in a later book, ‘Twilight Zones”-that images of slenderness are never “just pictures,” as the fashion magazines continually maintain (disingenuously) in their own defense. Not only are the artfully arranged bodies in the ads and videos and fashion spreads powerful lessons in how to see (and evaluate) bodies, but also they offer fantasies of safety, self-containment, acceptance, immunity from pain and hurt. They speak to young people not just about how to be beautiful but about how to become what the dominant culture admires, how to be cool, how to “get it together.” To girls who have been abused they may speak of transcendence or armoring or too-vulnerable female flesh. For racial and ethnic groups whose bodies have been marked as foreign, healthy, and primitive, or considered unattractive by Anglo-Saxon norms, they may cast the lure of assimilation, of becoming (metaphorically speaking) “white.”
 
The lights go down, the slides go up. Much bigger than they appear in the magazines, but also, oddly brought down to size. For just a moment we confront how bizarre, how impossible, how contradictory the images are. We laugh together over Oprah’s head digitally grafted to another woman’s body, at the ad for breast implants in which the boobs stick straight up into the air. We gasp together as the before and after photos of Jennifer Lopez are placed side by side. We cheer for Marion Jones’s shoulders, boo the fact that WNBA Barbie is just the same old Barbie, but with a basketball in her hand. For just a moment, we are in charge of the impact the faked images of “perfect" bodies have on us.
We look at them together and share-just for a moment-outrage.
  • In our Sunday news. Without morning coffee. On the bus, in the airport, at the checkout line Sharing our day off from work, from school, illicit and delicious with us under the quilt. Or domestic company, our of the corner of the eye as we fold the laundry in front of the television. It may be a 5 A.M. addiction to the glittering promises of the infomercial: the latest in fat-dissolving pills, miracle hair restoration, make-up secrets of the stars. Or a glancing relationship while waiting at the dentist, trying to distract from the impending root canal. Or a luscious, shiny smile, a deliberate splurge, a can’t-wait-to-get-home-with-you devotion. A teen magazine: tips on how to dress, how to wear your hair, how to make him want you. A movie seen at the theater, still large and magical in the dark. The endless commercials and advertisements we believe we pay no attention to.
    Constant, everywhere, no big deal. Like the water in the goldfish bowl, barely noticed by inhabitants. Or noticed, but dismissed: “Eye Candy”-a harmless indulgence. They go down easily, in and out, digested and forgotten. Hardly able anymore to rouse our indignation.
    Just pictures.
    • “In the Empire of Images: Preface to the Tenth Anniversary Edition”, p.xiii
  • “Frontline” asked Alexandra Shulman, editor of British “Vogue”, if the fashion industry felt any responsibility for creating the impossible to-achieve images that young girls measure themselves against. Shulman shrugged. “Not many people have actually said to me that they have looked at my magazine and decided to become anorexic.”
    Is it possible that Shulman actually believes it works that way?
    • p.xiv
  • Are we sophisticated enough to recognize that the images are not “real”? Does it matter?
  • What Haworth isn’t saying, too, is that the bar of what we consider “perfection” is constantly being raised-by cultural imagery, by the surgeon’s own recommendations, and by eyes that become habituated to interpreting every deviation as “defect.” Ann, a prospective patient described in the same “Vogue” article, has a well toned body of 105 pounds but is obsessed with what she sees as grotesque fat pockets on her inner thighs. “No matter how skinny I get, they get smaller but never go away,” she complains. It’s unlikely that Ann, whom Haworth considers a perfect candidate for liposuction, will stop there. “Plastic surgery sharpens your eyesight,” admits a more honest surgeon, “You get something done, suddenly you’re looking in the mirror every five minutes-at imperfections nobody else can see.”
    Where did Ann get the idea that any vestige of fat must be banished from her body? Most likely, it wasn’t from comparing herself to other real women, but to those computer-generated torsos-in ads for anti-cellulite cream and the like-whose hips and thighs and buttocks are smooth and seamless as gently sloping sand-dunes. No actual person has a body like that. But that doesn’t matter-because our expectations, our desires, our judgments about bodies, are becoming dictated by the digital. When was the last time you actually saw a wrinkle-or cellulite-or a drooping jowl-or a pucker or a pocket-in a magazine or video image? Ten years ago Harper’s magazine printed the invoice Esquire had received for retouching a cover picture of Michelle Pfeiffer. The picture was accompanied by copy that read: ”What Michelle Pfeiffer needs … is absolutely nothing.” What Pfeiffer’s picture alone needed to appear on that cover was actually $1,525 worth of chin trimming, complexion cleansing, neck softening, line removal, and other assorted touches.
    • pp.xvi-xviii
  • Now, in 2003, virtually every celebrity image you see-in the magazines, in the videos, and sometimes even in the movies-has been digitally modified. Virtually every image. Let that sink in. Don’t just let your mind passively receive it. Confront its implications. This is not just a matter of deception-boring old stuff, which ads have traded in from their beginnings. This is perceptual pedagogy, How to Interpret Your Body 101. These images are teaching us how to see. Filtered, smoothed, polished, softened, sharpened, re-arranged. And passing. Digital creations, visual cyborgs, teaching us what to expect from flesh and blood. Training our perception in what's a defect and what is normal.
    Are we sophisticated enough to know the images are not “real”? Does it matter? There are no disclaimers on the ads: “Warning: This body is generated by a computer. Don’t expect your thighs to look this way.” Would it matter to Ann if there were? Who cares about reality when beauty, love, acceptance beckon? Does sophistication have anything to do with it?
    • p.xviii
  • Until recently, most clinicians were not receptive to the arguments of feminists like Susie Ohrbach (and later, myself) that “body image disturbance syndrome,” binge/purge cycling, bulimic thinking,” and all the rest needed to be understood as much more culturally normative than generally recognized. They wanted to draw a sharp dividing line between pathology and normality-a line that can be very blurry when it comes to eating and body-image problems in this culture. And while they acknowledged that images “play a role,” they clung to the notion that only girls with a “predisposing vulnerability” get into trouble. Trained in a medical model which seeks the abuse or disorder in individual and family pathology, they hadn’t yet understood just how powerful, ubiquitous, and invasive the demands of culture are on our bodies and souls.
    • pp.xviii-xix
  • One of the hardest challenges I faced, in presenting these ideas at conferences and public lectures, was getting medical professionals and academics to take cultural imagery seriously. Most clinicians, unaccustomated to viewing images as anything other than “mere fashion,” saw cultural interpretation as somehow minimizing the seriousness of eating disorders. I insisted-an argument I laid out explicitly in a later book, ‘Twilight Zones”-that images of slenderness are never “just pictures,” as the fashion magazines continually maintain (disingenuously) in their own defense. Not only are the artfully arranged bodies in the ads and videos and fashion spreads powerful lessons in how to see (and evaluate) bodies, but also they offer fantasies of safety, self-containment, acceptance, immunity from pain and hurt. They speak to young people not just about how to be beautiful but about how to become what the dominant culture admires, how to be cool, how to “get it together.” To girls who have been abused they may speak of transcendence or armoring or too-vulnerable female flesh. For racial and ethnic groups whose bodies have been marked as foreign, healthy, and primitive, or considered unattractive by Anglo-Saxon norms, they may cast the lure of assimilation, of becoming (metaphorically speaking) “white.”
    • p.xxi-xxii
  • Still, progressive forces are not entirely asleep in the empire of images. I think of YM teen magazine, for example. After conducting a survey which revealed that 86 percent of its young readers were dissatisfied with the way their bodies looked, YM openly declared war on eating disorders and body-image problems, instituting an editorial policy against the publishing of diet pieces and deliberately seeking out full-size modes-without “marking” them as such-for all its fashion spreads.(27) I like to think this resistance to the hegemony of the fat-free body may have something to do with the fact that the editors are young enough to have studied feminism and cultural studies while they got their B.A.’s in English and journalism.
    It’s easy, too, to be cynical. Today’s fashionable diversity is brought to us, after all, by the same people who brought us the hegemony of the blue-eyed blonde and who’ve made wrinkles and cellulite into diseases. It’s easy to dismiss fashion’s current love affair with full lips and biracial children as ethnic chic, fetishes of the month. To see it all as a shameless attempt to exploit ethnic niches and white beauty-tourism. Having a child, however, has given me another perspective, as I try to imagine how it looks through her eyes. Cassie knows nothing about the motives of the people who’ve produced the images. At her age, she can only take them at face value. And at face value, they present a world which includes her, celebrates her, as the world that I grew up in did not include and celebrate me. For all my and cynicism and frustration with our empire of images, I cannot help but be grateful for this.
    • pp.xxxi-xxxii
  • On good days, I feel heartened by what is happening in the teen magazines and in the Lane Bryant and “Just My Size” ads. Perhaps advertisers are discovering that making people feel bad about themselves, then offering products which promise to make it all better, is not the only way to make a buck. As racial representations have shown, diversity is marketable. Perhaps, as Lane Bryant and others are hoping, encouraging people to feel okay about their bodies can sell products too. Sometimes, surveying the plastic, digitalized world of bodies that are the norm now, I am convinced that our present slate of enchantment is just a moment away from revulsion, or perhaps simply boredom. I see twenty-something woman dancing at a local outdoor swing party, her tummy softly protruding over the thick leather belt of her low-rider jeans. Not taut, not toned, not artfully camoflauged like some unsightly deformity, but proudly, sensuously displayed, reminding me of Madonna in the days before she became the sinewy dominatrix. It is possible that we are beginning to rebel against the manufactured look of celebrity bodies, beginning to be repelled by their armored “perfection”?
    These hopeful moments, I have to admit, are fleeting. Usually, I feel horrified-and afraid for my daughter. I am sharply aware that expressing this horror openly nowadays is to run the risk of being thought a preachy prude, relic of an outmoded feminism. At talks to young audiences, I try to lighten my touch, celebrate the positive, make sure that my criticisms of our culture are not confused with being anti-beauty, anti-fitness, or anti-sex. But I also know that when parents and teachers become fully one with the culture, children are abandoned to it. I don’t tell them to love their bodies or turn off the television-useless admonitions today, and one I cannot obey myself. But I do try to provide disruption, if only temporary, of their everyday immersion in the culture. For just an hour or so, I won’t let it pass itself off simply as “normalcy.”
    • p.xxxii-xxxiii
  • The lights go down, the slides go up. Much bigger than they appear in the magazines, but also, oddly brought down to size. For just a moment we confront how bizarre, how impossible, how contradictory the images are. We laugh together over Oprah’s head digitally grafted to another woman’s body, at the ad for breast implants in which the boobs stick straight up into the air. We gasp together as the before and after photos of Jennifer Lopez are placed side by side. We cheer for Marion Jones’s shoulders, boo the fact that WNBA Barbie is just the same old Barbie, but with a basketball in her hand. For just a moment, we are in charge of the impact the faked images of “perfect" bodies have on us.
    We look at them together and share-just for a moment-outrage.
    • p.xxxiii
  • Susceptibility to “images” can still be conceptualized in terms of a passive subject and a mechanical process. To acknowledge, however, that meaning is continually being produced at all levels-by the culture, by the subject, by the clinician as well-and that in a fundamental sense there “is” no body that exists neutrally, outside this process of making meaning, no body that passively awaits the objective deciphering of trained experts, is to question the presuppositions on which much of modern science is built and around which our highly specialized, professionalized, and compartmentalized culture revolves. Or, to put this another way: it is to suggest that the study of the disordered body is as much the proper province of cultural critics in every field and of nonspecialists, ordinary but critically questioning citizens, as it is o the “experts.” This audacious challenge is the legacy of the feminist reconceptualization of eating disorders.
    • p.69

G - L

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Images are books for the illiterate and silent heralds of the honor of the saints, teaching those who see with a soundless voice and sanctifying the sight. ~ John of Damascus
 
How can you save lay persons when you ascribe to images the power which God gave to his word alone? ~ Andreas Karlstadt
 
Crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth - David Lauber: When the crucified Jesus is called the 'image of the invisible God', the meaning is that this is God, and God is like this.
  • Then God said, 'Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, … So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.
    • Genesis (1:26-27), in Anne Graham Lotz God's Story, Thomas Nelson Inc, 02-Sep-1997, p. 19.
  • Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed: for in the image of God made he man.
  • It's funny how your relationship with your own looks changes when you go weeks without seeing yourself. None of us really knows what we look like after all. In that nanosecond it takes for a mirror to give our faces back to us our mind has already done all sorts of perverse rearranging.
  • One picture in ten thousand, perhaps, ought to live in the applause of mankind, from generation to generation until the colors fade and blacken out of sight or the canvas rot entirely away.
    • Nathaniel Hawthorne, Marble Faun, Book II, Chapter XII. In Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 576-77.
  • Memory offers up its gifts only when jogged by something in the present. It isn't a storehouse of fixed images and words, but a dynamic associative network in the brain that is never quiet and is subject to revision each time we retrieve an old picture or old words.
  • Images are books for the illiterate and silent heralds of the honor of the saints, teaching those who see with a soundless voice and sanctifying the sight.
    • John of Damascus "Defense against those who attack the holy images," as translated by Andrew Louth, Three Treatises on the Divine Images, (Saint Vladimir’s Seminary Press: 2003) p. 46
  • An empty canvas is a living wonder -- far lovelier than certain pictures.
  • Who will believe us when we say that we do not love these stuffed dummies—carved or painted images—when our deeds convict us? God hates and despises images, as I shall show. He considers them an abomination and says that all human beings are in his eyes as the things they love. Images are an abomination; it follows therefore that we too shall become abominable, if we love them.
  • It cannot therefore be true that images are the textbooks of laypersons. For they are unable to learn their salvation from them. ... How can you save lay persons when you ascribe to images the power which God gave to his word alone?
  • If you were to really hate and dislike a picture with all your heart, so that you could not bear to see or hear of it, how would you like it if someone insisted on getting to know and honor you through such a hated, horrible book? ... And God says that he does not like any image which we make, and ... that he hates and despises all who love images.
  • God desires to indwell in my whole and total heart and cannot in any way tolerate my having an image in my mind's eye.
  • It was a beautiful embodied thought,
    A dream of the fine painter, one of those
    That pass by moonlight o'er the soul, and flit
    'Mid the dim shades of twilight, when the eye
    Grows tearful with its ecstasy.
    • Letitia Elizabeth Landon, The London Literary Gazette (1st June 1822), Poetic Sketches. Second series - Sketch the Fifth - Mr. Martin’s Picture of Clytie
  • The picture that approaches sculpture nearest
    Is the best picture.

M - R

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Magic and art tend to share a lot of the same language. They both talk about evocation, invocation, and conjuring. If you’re trying to conjure a character, then maybe you should treat that with the respect that you would if you were trying to conjure a demon. Because if an image of a god is a god, then in some sense the image of a demon is a demon. ~ Alan Moore
 
Um Habiba and Um Salama mentioned about a church they had seen in Ethiopia in which there were pictures. They told the Prophet about it, on which he said, "If any religious man dies amongst those people they would build a place of worship at his grave and make these pictures in it. They will be the worst creature in the sight of Allah on the Day of Resurrection. ~ Muhammad
  • Magic and art tend to share a lot of the same language. They both talk about evocation, invocation, and conjuring. If you’re trying to conjure a character, then maybe you should treat that with the respect that you would if you were trying to conjure a demon. Because if an image of a god is a god, then in some sense the image of a demon is a demon. I’m thinking of people like Malcolm Lowry, the exquisite author of Under the Volcano. There are kabbalistic demons that are lurking all the way through Under the Volcano, and I assume they were probably similar forces to the ones that eventually overwhelmed Lowry’s life, such as the drinking and the madness. When I hear alcoholics talk about having their demons, I think that they’re probably absolutely literally correct.
  • Um Habiba and Um Salama mentioned about a church they had seen in Ethiopia in which there were pictures. They told the Prophet about it, on which he said, "If any religious man dies amongst those people they would build a place of worship at his grave and make these pictures in it. They will be the worst creature in the sight of Allah on the Day of Resurrection.
    • Muhammad as narrated by Aisha (the wife of the Prophet) Sahih Bukhari 1:8:419
  • My goal was to be different, strong; to sculpt my own body to reinvent the self. It's all about being different and creating a clash with society because of that. I tried to use surgery not to better myself or become a younger version of myself, but to work on the concept of image and surgery the other way around. I was the first artist to do it.
  • I am not sure I can change such a thing, but I can produce images that are different from those we find in comics, video games, magazines and TV shows. There are other ways to think about one's body and one's beauty. If you were to describe me without anyone being able to see me, they would think I am a monster, that I am not fuckable. But if they see me, that could perhaps change.
  • In the old days pictures went forward toward completion by stages. Every day brought something new. A picture used to be a sum of additions. In my case a picture is a sum of destructions. I do a picture — then I destroy it. In the end though, nothing is lost: the red I took away from one place turns up somewhere else.
  • I think a picture is more like the real world when it is made out of the real world.
  • We are frequently faced with the necessity of looking for the picture required for the visualization of an object, not in the perception of this particular object, but in a different perceptual image. ...we can assert the discrepancy between the perceived picture and the objective state. This discrepancy... proves absolutely nothing against the fact that all visualizations are merely sense qualities of the perceptual space. ...If the parallelism is ...to be visualized, we must supplement our assertion by the description of certain qualities with which we are familiar from perceptual space.
  • Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images (εἰκόνος) resembling mortal man.
    • Romans 1:22-23

"Fetal Images: The Power of Visual Culture in the Politics of Reproduction" (1987)

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Petchesky, Rosalind Pollack (1987) "Fetal Images: The Power of Visual Culture in the Politics of Reproduction". Feminist Studies. 13 (2)

 
The strategy of antiabortionists to make fetal personhood a self-fulfilling prophecy by making the fetus a public presence addresses a visually oriented culture. Meanwhile, finding "positive" images and symbols of abortion hard to imagine, feminists and other prochoice advocates have all too readily ceded the visual terrain.
 
Images by themselves lack "objective" meanings; meanings come from the interlocking fields of context, communication, application, and reception. If we removed from the ultrasound image of The Silent Scream its title, its text, its sound narrative, Dr. Nathanson, the media and distribution networks, and the whole antiabortion political climate, what would remain? But, of course, the question is absurd because no image dangles in a cultural void, just as no fetus floats in a space capsule. The problem clearly becomes, then, how do we change the contexts, media, and consciousnesses through which fetal images are defined?

Antiabortionists in both the United States and Britain have long applied the principle that a picture of a dead fetus is worth a thousand words. Chaste silhouettes of the fetal form, of voyeuristic necrophilic photographs of its remains, litter the background of any abortion talk. These still images float like spirits through the courtrooms, where lawyers argue that fetuses can claim tort liability; through the hospitals and clinics, where physicians welcome them as "patients"; and in front of all the abortion centers, legislative committees, bus terminals, and other places that "right-to-lifers" haunt. The strategy of antiabortionists to make fetal personhood a self-fulfilling prophecy by making the fetus a public presence addresses a visually oriented culture. Meanwhile, finding "positive" images and symbols of abortion hard to imagine, feminists and other prochoice advocates have all too readily ceded the visual terrain.

    • pp.263-264
  • Like the Great Communicator who charms through lies, the medical authority figure- paternalistic and technocratic at the same time - delivers these messages less by his words than by the power of his image and his persona.
    • p.267
  • As with any visual image, The Silent Scream relies on our predisposition to "see" what it wants us to "see" because of a range of influences that come out of the particular culture and history in which we live. The aura of medical authority, the allure of technology, the cumulative impact of a decade of fetal images- on billboards, in shopping center malls, in science fiction blockbusters like 2001: A Space Odyssey-all rescue the film from utter absurdity; they make it credible. "The fetal form" itself has, within the larger culture, acquired a symbolic import that condenses within it a series of losses-from sexual innocence to compliant women to American imperial might. It is not the image of a baby at all but of a tiny man, a homunculus.
    • pp.267-268
  • It is not only anti abortionists who respond to fetal images however. The "public" presentation of the fetus has become ubiquitous; its disembodied form, now propped up by medical authority and technological rationality, permeates mass culture. We are all, on some level, susceptible to its coded meanings. Victor Burgin points out that it does no good to protest the "falseness" of such images as against "reality," because "reality"-that is, how we experience the world, both "public" and "private"-" is itself constituted through the agency of representations." This suggests that women's ways of seeing ultrasound images of fetuses, even their own, may be affected by the cumulative array of "public" representations, from Life Magazine to The Silent Scream. And it possibly means that some of them will be intimidated from getting abortions-although as yet we have little empirical information to verify this. When young women seeking abortions are coerced or manipulated into seeing pictures of fetuses, their own or others, it is the "public fetus" as moral abstraction they are being made to view. But the reception and meanings of fetal images also derive from the particular circumstances of the woman as viewer, and these circumstances may not fit neatly within a model of women as victims of reproductive technologies. Above all, the meanings of fetal images will differ depending on whether a woman wishes to be pregnant or not. With regard to wanted pregnancies, women with very diverse political values may respond positively to images that present their fetus as if detached, their own body as if absent from the scene. The reasons are a complex weave of socioeconomic position, gender psychology, and biology.
    • pp.281-282
  • Attachment of pregnant women to their fetuses at earlier stages in pregnancy becomes an issue, not because it is cemented through "sight" rather than "feel," but when and if it is used to obstruct or harass an abortion decision. In fact, there is no reason any woman's abortion decision should be tortured in this way, because there is no medical rationale for requiring her to view an image of her fetus. Responsible abortion clinics are doing ultrasound imaging in selected cases-only to determine fetal size or placement, where the date of the woman's last menstrual period is unknown, the pregnancy is beyond the first trimester, or there is a history of problems; or to diagnose an ectopic pregnancy. But in such cases the woman herself does not see the image, because the monitor is placed outside her range of vision and clinic protocols refrain from showing her the picture unless she specifically requests it. In the current historical context, to consciously limit the uses of fetal images in abortion clinics is to take a political stance, to resist the message of The Silent Scream. This reminds us that the politics of reproductive technologies are constructed contextually, out of who uses them, how, and for what purposes.
    • p.285
  • Images by themselves lack "objective" meanings; meanings come from the interlocking fields of context, communication, application, and reception. If we removed from the ultrasound image of The Silent Scream its title, its text, its sound narrative, Dr. Nathanson, the media and distribution networks, and the whole antiabortion political climate, what would remain? But, of course, the question is absurd because no image dangles in a cultural void, just as no fetus floats in a space capsule. The problem clearly becomes, then, how do we change the contexts, media, and consciousnesses through which fetal images are defined?
    • pp.286-287

S - Z

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The mirror ought to be taken as a guide... you see the picture made upon one plane showing things which appear in relief, and the mirror upon one plane does the same. The picture is on one single surface, and the mirror is the same. ~ Leonardo da Vinci
 
Thracian peltast, 5th–4th century BC. - Xenophanes: The Ethiops say that their gods are flat-nosed and black,
While the Thracians say that theirs have blue eyes and red hair...
 
Image and appearance tell you little. The inside is bigger than the outside when you have the eyes to see. ~ William Paul Young
  • Ancient portraits are symbolic images without any immediate relation to the individuals represented; they are not portraits as we understand them. ...It is remarkable that philologists who are capable of carrying accuracy to the extremes in the case of words are as credulous as babies when it comes to "images," and yet an image is so full of information that ten thousands words would not add up to it.
    • George Sarton A History of Science Vol.2 Hellenistic Science and Culture in the Last Three Centuries B.C. (1959). Preface.
  • When you wish to see whether the general effect of your picture corresponds with that of the object represented after nature, take a mirror and set it so that it reflects the actual thing, and then compare the reflection with your picture, and consider carefully whether the subject of the two images is in conformity with both, studying especially the mirror. The mirror ought to be taken as a guide... you see the picture made upon one plane showing things which appear in relief, and the mirror upon one plane does the same. The picture is on one single surface, and the mirror is the same. ...if you but know well how to compose your picture it will also seem a natural thing seen in a great mirror.
  • Imagery played a central role in theories of the mind for centuries. For example, the British Associationists conceptualizes thought itself as sequences of images. And, Wilhelm Wundt, the founder of scientific psychology, emphasized the analysis of images. However, the central role of imagery in theories of mental activity was undermined when Kulpe, in 1904, pointed out that some thoughts are not accompanied by imagery (e.g., one is not aware of the processes that allow one to decide which of two objects is heavier).
    • Robert Andrew Wilson, ‎Frank C. Keil (2001), The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences. p. 387
  • 2.1 We picture facts to ourselves.
    2.11 A picture presents a situation in logical space, the existence and non-existence of states of affairs.
    2.12 A picture is a model of reality.
    2.13 In a picture objects have the elements of the picture corresponding to them.
    2.131 In a picture the elements of the picture are the representatives of objects.
    2.14 What constitutes a picture is that its elements are related to one another in a determinate way.
    2.141 A picture is a fact.
  • [T]he true vanishing point of every picture is the death image, the Todesbild. The tomb effigy, the memorial portrait, and the death mask approach a condition of perfect substitutability for the irrevocably absent object, the once-living body. The dead person exchanges his body for an image; that image holds a place for him among the living (p. 29 and chap. 6). Belting describes this exchange, enacted in ancient cults of the dead, as the archetype of the image- body-medium triangle (p. 29). The photograph, the performance, and the statue, in turn, point directly toward that ideal exchange-ability. Essentially, every image wants to be a home for a lost soul. "Without the connection to death," Belting explicitly says, "those images that merely simulate the world of life quickly fall into a pointless circularity and the proverbial accusation of deceptiveness...." (p. 190). Death guarantees the image. Without that strong link to the irreversibly absent yet sharply desired object, the image would be a mere work of art.

See also

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