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The Arts

How Do Pictures Represent?

Marek Soszynski considers whether it couldn’t look like resemblance after all.

How do pictures represent in the way they do? How come a picture of a cat, for example, is indeed of a cat – actually has a cat as its object? Or to put it the other way around, how is a cat pictorially represented or depicted by its picture? If your first thought was to reply that it is simply because the picture looks like or resembles what it represents, then think again. I shall call this idea Resemblance, with a capital R. The Resemblance theory says that resemblance straightforwardly explains pictorial representation.

This idea is highly problematic. To give a couple of brief examples; we do not know what certain historical characters such as John the Baptist looked like, yet we can still successfully represent them in pictures; likewise with imaginary or impossible objects, which by their very nature are unavailable to be resembled.

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