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, The Republic, the Greek philosopher Plato described our apparent reality as a copy of a higher order of universal 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,” 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.[5] 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?]
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. The documentary film scholar 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:[6]