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]
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.
— David Leupold, Image and ideology. Some thoughts on Berger’s Another Way of Telling
Religious critiques
Despite, or perhaps because of, the widespread use of religious and spiritual imagery worldwide, the making of images and the depiction of gods or religious subjects has been subject to criticism, censorship, and criminal penalties. The Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) all have had admonitions against the making of images, even though the extent of that proscription has varied with time, place, and sect or denomination of a given religion. In Judaism, one of the Ten Commandments given by God to Moses on Mount Sinai forbids the making of “any graven image, 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 earth.” In Christian history, periods of iconoclasm (the destruction of images, especially those with religious meanings or connotations) have broken out from time to time, and some sects and denominations have rejected or severely limited the use of religious imagery. 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. Depending on time and place, photographs and broadcast images in Islamic societies may be less subject to outright prohibition. In any religion, restrictions on image-making are especially targeted to avoid depictions of “false gods” in the form of idols. In recent years, militant extremist groups such as the Taliban and ISIS have destroyed centuries-old artifacts, especially those associated with other religions.