UNDERSTANDING PICTURES by Dominic Lopes ( 9780198240976 ) - Books & Audio Books at Pickabook.co.uk

Item Details

Title:

UNDERSTANDING PICTURES

By:

Dominic Lopes

Format:

Hardback

List price:

£62.00

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£54.25

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12.5% off

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£7.75

ISBN 10:

019824097X

ISBN 13:

9780198240976

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Publisher:

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Pub. date:

28 March, 1996

Series:

Oxford Philosophical Monographs

Pages:

248

Description:

This book examines the kinds of visual and cultural skills viewers needs to have to understand pictures. It addresses a long-standing puzzle about pictures: how can they reflect their cultural and historical contexts and yet be understood outside those contexts? In answering this question, the book contrasts pictorial meaning with literary meaning and explains how pictures are capable of conveying information other media cannot.

Synopsis:

There is not one but many ways to picture the world - Australian 'x-ray' pictures, cubist collages, Amerindian split-style figures, and pictures in two-point perspective each draw attention to different features of what they represent. The premise of Understanding Pictures is that this diversity is the central fact with which a theory of figurative pictures must reckon. Lopes argues that identifying pictures' subjects is akin to recognizing objects whose appearances have changed over time. He develops a schema for categorizing the different ways pictures represent-the different kinds of meaning they have-and he contends that depiction's epistemic value lies in its representational diversity. He also offers a novel account of the phenomenology of pictorial experience, comparing pictures to visual prostheses like mirrors and binoculars. The book concludes with a discussion of works of art which have made pictorial meaning their theme, demonstrating the importance of the issues this book raises for understanding the aesthetics of pictures.

Illustrations:

illustrations throughout

Publication:

Imprint:

Clarendon Press

Returns:

Returnable

Some other items by this author:

A PHILOSOPHY OF COMPUTER ART