Image
The broader sense of the word 'image' also encompasses any two-dimensional figure, such as a map, graph, pie chart, painting, or banner.
An example of this is a grayscale ("black and white") image, which uses the visual system's sensitivity to brightness across all wavelengths without taking into account different colors.
Such processes often rely on detecting electromagnetic radiation that occurs beyond the light spectrum visible to the human eye and converting such signals into recognizable images.
[citation needed] Even in electronic formats such as television and digital image displays, the apparent "motion" is actually the result of many individual lines giving the impression of continuous movement.
This phenomenon has often been described as "persistence of vision": a physiological effect of light impressions remaining on the retina of the eye for very brief periods.
It may represent an abstract concept, such as the political power of a ruler or ruling class, a practical or moral lesson, an object for spiritual or religious veneration, or an object—human or otherwise—to be desired.
While such studies inevitably deal with issues of meaning, another approach to signification was suggested by the American philosopher, logician, and semiotician Charles Sanders Peirce.
In his dialogue, The Republic, the Greek philosopher Plato described our apparent reality as a copy of a higher order of universal forms.
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'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 such images may implicate the viewer in the voyeuristic position of a (usually) male viewer.
Images perpetuated in public education, media, and popular culture have a profound impact on the formation of such mental images:[6] 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).
Islam tends to discourage religious depictions, sometimes quite rigorously, and often extends that to other forms of realistic imagery, favoring calligraphy or geometric designs instead.
The German philosopher and essayist Walter Benjamin brought particular attention to this point in his 1935 essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.
"[7] Benjamin argues that the mechanical reproduction of images, which had accelerated through photographic processes in the previous one hundred years or so, inevitably degrades the "authenticity" or quasi-religious "aura" of the original object.
[8][better source needed] In modern times, the development of "non-fungible tokens" (NFTs) has been touted as an attempt to create "authentic" or "unique" images that have a monetary value, existing only in digital format.
[citation needed] The development of synthetic acoustic technologies and the creation of sound art have led to considering the possibilities of a sound-image made up of irreducible phonic substance beyond linguistic or musicological analysis.
[9] This phrase is used in photography, visual media, and the computer industry to emphasize that one is not talking about movies, or in very precise or pedantic technical writing such as a standard.
