# Understanding Pictures **Opening (not a real abstract):** There are 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 scheme 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 **Authors:** [[Dom Lopes]]