First of all, we should admit that the term of an image is not clear at all, because of the variety of things which go by this name. And, as some of us may think, it‘s not the problem of english language, because the english language has many words to name visual icons: an image, an icon, a picture, a spectacle, a view, an imago, a simulacrum, a vision, a sight and others. ‚An image‘ is simply very wide term. ‘We speak of pictures, statues, optical illusions, maps, diagrams, dreams, hallucinations, spectacles, projections, poems, patterns, memories, and even ideas as images, and the sheer diversity of this list would seem to make any systematic, unified understanding impossible.‘[1] Although we may feel that all these objects named by a word ‘an image’ have something in common, there are huge differences between them.
Th. Mitchell suggests thinking of them ‘as a far-flung family which has migrated in time and space and undergone profound mutations in the process. If we begin by looking, not for some universal
definition of the term, but at those places where images have differentiated themselves from one another on the basis of boundaries between different institutional discourses, we come up with a family tree something like the following:
The idea of Imagery
Image
likeness
resemblance
similitude
Graphic Optical
mirrors
projections
Perceptual
sense data
“species”
appearances
Mental
dreams
memories
ideas
fantasmata
Verbal
pictures
statues
designs
metaphors
descriptions.[2]
As we see from this ‘tree’, each branch of his shows a type of imagery which is central to the discourse of some intellectual discipline. Psychology and epistemology are based on mental imagery, physics – optical imagery, art history – graphic, sculptural and architectural imagery, literature – verbal imagery. So say further, ‘perceptual images occupy a kind of border region where physiologists, neurologists, psychologists, art historians, and students of optics find themselves collaborating with philosophers and literary critics.‘[3]
But still – what is an image? At least we can say a few things: images are subtle but nevertheless substantial propagated by objects and are forcibly impressing themselves on our senses. Sometimes images which we get through the media (or medium) are regarded as merely formal entities, this means without substance. ‘Some theories even describe the transmission as moving in the other direction, from our eyes to the objects.‘[4]
[1] Th. Mitchell ‘Iconology’.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid.
Žymos: icon, iconology, imagery, thomas mitchell, what is an image