Image and Picture
Two words that overlap in popular conversation: image and picture. You hear them used interchangeably; most of the time, each means the other.
But I'm impatient with casual synonyms. In my experience, sloppy speech yields sloppy thinking, and when a word takes on many different meanings, or when two different words gradually come to mean the same thing, ideas get hidden. In this case, conflating "image" with "picture" is actually erasing something important, denying us access to a concept that can help us clarify what we're doing, who we are.
Here's a thought (suggested by Patrick Maynard, The Engine of Visualization): let's use the word "image" when we're talking about the observed properties of light and mind, and "picture" when we talk about the human activity of making those observations physical, concrete.
That is, the refractive and reflective properties of light described by Newton, and that Einstein used to measure gravity deflection, are characteristics of the Universe, not human design; in that sense, "images" aren't made. Likewise, the property of mind that we call "imagination" is an emergent characteristic of the way our brains are structured and, like random reflections on a sunny day, often occur haphazardly and outside of our direct control; daydreams are a great example of what I mean here. In both of these cases, the word "image" has been often applied historically.
On the other hand, let's reserve "picture" for the artifacts brought about by that focused and purposeful act of human ingenuity, creativity, and intention we know from everyday snapshots, Flickr, advertising, journalism, movies, YouTube, school portraits, mug shots, xrays, brain scans, Mars Rover landscapes.
Historically, if you go back to the Latin roots, a "picture" has always been closely allied with the idea of "painting," the activity and its product, while the word "image," also from the Latin, has whipped back-and-forth like a loose garden hose to mean both a purposeful act and a characteristic of the non-human, physical world. So, I've been challenged, who cares? Since usage has been woozy for a while, what difference does it make today?
The difference today is that picture-making has never been so ubiquitous nor so critical to human survival, to humanity's survival. Did you catch the 60 Minutes piece about the new brain research into thought-imaging? Are you watching the current war on television? Do you remember the cell-phones at Abu Ghraib? How about the pictures of aluminum tubes shown by Colin Powell to the United Nations? And that's not even to bring up (again) the power of advertising and all the other less dramatic pictorial propaganda saturating our daily lives. Nor, it should be added, to begin to consider the recent observations coming from current research into blindsight, and the implications it may hold for the basic concept of "visual" (after all, if behavior can be altered by stimulae from the "optic" nerve that isn't accessed by the "visual" cortex, we might have a lot of other re-defining to do).
Okay, but to step back from the brink for a minute, take the heat down a notch, I think there are immediate practical benefits to cleaning up our vocabulary here. For instance, when "image" means properties of light and mind that are largely beyond direct human intervention, and when "picture" means the artifacts created by direct intervention, then we can more easily distinguish our world from our actions. This gives us more clarity and allows us to talk about pictures that come from images (such as pictures based on an image from the camera obscurra), as distinct from images that come from pictures (for example, how anexoria nervousa can be aggravated by certain kinds of advertising campaigns).
Another example, from the classroom: we can talk clearly about how to make pictures that correspond to the images we hold in our minds.
Likewise, if we implicitly understand that "picture" always means "artifact," then it's easier for us to own the products of our labor; so, for example, when we say "this is my picture," we implicitly foreground our creative intervention. This simple acknowledgement nicely sidesteps misconceptions that ooze from the boring circularity of today's digital vs. analogue discussion, which continues to distract us from more important questions. Namely, the question of our responsibility for what we say, think, and do.
The idea that's hidden, erased, when image and picture mean the same thing, is the idea that what we do changes the world. Putting it bluntly, pictures aren't from the world; pictures create the world.
Abelardo Morell's work plays with these ideas and I frequently refer to it in my teaching.
But I'm impatient with casual synonyms. In my experience, sloppy speech yields sloppy thinking, and when a word takes on many different meanings, or when two different words gradually come to mean the same thing, ideas get hidden. In this case, conflating "image" with "picture" is actually erasing something important, denying us access to a concept that can help us clarify what we're doing, who we are.
Here's a thought (suggested by Patrick Maynard, The Engine of Visualization): let's use the word "image" when we're talking about the observed properties of light and mind, and "picture" when we talk about the human activity of making those observations physical, concrete.
That is, the refractive and reflective properties of light described by Newton, and that Einstein used to measure gravity deflection, are characteristics of the Universe, not human design; in that sense, "images" aren't made. Likewise, the property of mind that we call "imagination" is an emergent characteristic of the way our brains are structured and, like random reflections on a sunny day, often occur haphazardly and outside of our direct control; daydreams are a great example of what I mean here. In both of these cases, the word "image" has been often applied historically.
On the other hand, let's reserve "picture" for the artifacts brought about by that focused and purposeful act of human ingenuity, creativity, and intention we know from everyday snapshots, Flickr, advertising, journalism, movies, YouTube, school portraits, mug shots, xrays, brain scans, Mars Rover landscapes.
Historically, if you go back to the Latin roots, a "picture" has always been closely allied with the idea of "painting," the activity and its product, while the word "image," also from the Latin, has whipped back-and-forth like a loose garden hose to mean both a purposeful act and a characteristic of the non-human, physical world. So, I've been challenged, who cares? Since usage has been woozy for a while, what difference does it make today?
The difference today is that picture-making has never been so ubiquitous nor so critical to human survival, to humanity's survival. Did you catch the 60 Minutes piece about the new brain research into thought-imaging? Are you watching the current war on television? Do you remember the cell-phones at Abu Ghraib? How about the pictures of aluminum tubes shown by Colin Powell to the United Nations? And that's not even to bring up (again) the power of advertising and all the other less dramatic pictorial propaganda saturating our daily lives. Nor, it should be added, to begin to consider the recent observations coming from current research into blindsight, and the implications it may hold for the basic concept of "visual" (after all, if behavior can be altered by stimulae from the "optic" nerve that isn't accessed by the "visual" cortex, we might have a lot of other re-defining to do).
Okay, but to step back from the brink for a minute, take the heat down a notch, I think there are immediate practical benefits to cleaning up our vocabulary here. For instance, when "image" means properties of light and mind that are largely beyond direct human intervention, and when "picture" means the artifacts created by direct intervention, then we can more easily distinguish our world from our actions. This gives us more clarity and allows us to talk about pictures that come from images (such as pictures based on an image from the camera obscurra), as distinct from images that come from pictures (for example, how anexoria nervousa can be aggravated by certain kinds of advertising campaigns).
Another example, from the classroom: we can talk clearly about how to make pictures that correspond to the images we hold in our minds.
Likewise, if we implicitly understand that "picture" always means "artifact," then it's easier for us to own the products of our labor; so, for example, when we say "this is my picture," we implicitly foreground our creative intervention. This simple acknowledgement nicely sidesteps misconceptions that ooze from the boring circularity of today's digital vs. analogue discussion, which continues to distract us from more important questions. Namely, the question of our responsibility for what we say, think, and do.
The idea that's hidden, erased, when image and picture mean the same thing, is the idea that what we do changes the world. Putting it bluntly, pictures aren't from the world; pictures create the world.
Abelardo Morell's work plays with these ideas and I frequently refer to it in my teaching.
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