Image

=== Critiques of imagery ===
The nature of images, whether three-dimensional or two-dimensional, created for a specific purpose or only for aesthetic pleasure, has continued to provoke questions and even condemnation at different times and places. In his dialogue [[Republic (Plato)|''The Republic'']], the Greek philosopher [[Plato]] described our apparent reality as a copy of a higher order of universal [[Theory of forms|forms]]. As copies of a higher reality, the things we perceive in the world, tangible or abstract, are inevitably imperfect. Book 7 of ''The Republic'' offers Plato's "[[Allegory of the cave|Allegory of the Cave]]," where ordinary human life is compared to being a prisoner in a darkened cave who believes that shadows projected onto the cave's wall comprise actual reality.{{citation needed|date=November 2023}} Since art is itself an imitation, it is a copy of that copy and all the more imperfect. Artistic images, then, not only misdirect human reason away from understanding the higher forms of true reality, but in imitating the bad behaviors of humans in depictions of the gods, they can corrupt individuals and society.{{According to whom|date=November 2023}}

Echoes of such criticism have persisted across time, accelerating as image-making technologies have developed and expanded immensely since the invention of the [[daguerreotype]] and other photographic processes in the mid-19th century. By the late 20th century, works like [[John Berger|John Berger's]] ''[[Ways of Seeing]]'' and [[Susan Sontag]]'s ''[[On Photography]]'' questioned the hidden assumptions of power, race, sex, and class encoded in even realistic images and how those assumptions and how such images may implicate the viewer in the [[Voyeurism|voyeuristic]] position of a (usually) male viewer. The [[documentary film]] scholar [[Bill Nichols (film critic)|Bill Nichols]] has also studied how apparently "objective" photographs and films still encode assumptions about their subjects.

Images perpetuated in public education, media, and popular culture have a profound impact on the formation of such mental images:<ref>{{Cite web |last=Leupold |first=David |date=2020-04-08 |title=Image and ideology. Some thoughts on Berger's Another Way of Telling |url=https://medium.com/@davidleupold/arresting-images-a-reading-of-bergers-another-way-of-telling-1995-d8c4861c1473 |url-access=limited |url-status=live |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210202113232/https://medium.com/@davidleupold/arresting-images-a-reading-of-bergers-another-way-of-telling-1995-d8c4861c1473 |archive-date=Feb 2, 2021 |access-date=2020-09-28 |website=Medium |language=en}}</ref>

{{Blockquote|text=What makes them so powerful is that they circumvent the faculties of the conscious mind but, instead, directly target the subconscious and affective, thus evading direct inquiry through contemplative reasoning. By doing so such axiomatic images let us know what we shall desire (liberalism, in a snapshot: the crunchy honey-flavored cereals and the freshly-pressed orange juice in the back of a suburban one-family home) and from what we shall obstain (communism, in a snapshot: lifeless crowds of men and machinery marching towards certain perdition accompanied by the tunes of Soviet Russian songs). What makes those images so powerful is that it is only of relative minor relevance for the stabilization of such images whether they actually capture and correspond with the multiple layers of reality, or not.|author=David Leupold|title=Image and ideology. Some thoughts on Berger's Another Way of Telling|source=}}