# Understanding Pictures ![rw-book-cover](https://readwise-assets.s3.amazonaws.com/media/uploaded_book_covers/profile_1188016/SSG8n0rpEoFMsr8hoPVHi8tB15emQVf6-y2kFGz8HjQ-cove_zamLfME.png) ## Metadata - Author: [[Dom Lopes]] - Full Title: Understanding Pictures - Category: #articles - Summary: insert summary - My notes: - URL: https://readwise.io/reader/document_raw_content/144375175 - Source File: Understanding Pictures by Dom Lopes.pdf ## LLM Chats ## NotebookLM ## LLM Audio ## Highlights > Of course, pictures are objects in the world, too. They have physical properties that vary with their physical composition, size, age, and the like. Among these is a privileged set of visual properties, those by means of which pictures represent their subjects. I shall speak of these properties as making up pictures’ ‘designs’. An incomplete list of pic- torial design properties would include marks, directions, boundaries, contours, shapes, colours, hues, relative contrasts between light and dark, and also textures, such as smoothness of surface or invisibility of brushwork. Design properties are typically laid down in paint, ink, charcoal, or some other substance, on a flat surface. (However, the image of a slide projected on a screen shows that pictorial colours and shapes need not be comprised of any pigmented substance.) ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hq85x5zt3a4z05a80p1w06bk)) > Content is not easily confused with design. A picture’s line, shading, colour, and textural properties are rarely properties it ascribes to its subject. Piazza San Marco does not represent San Marco’s basilica as a few centimetres in height, though that is the height of the brush strokes comprising its design. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hq861npk7zx2ppf0gwxyctyw)) > An explanation of how pictures come by their contents, thereby enabling them to give rise to experiences as of certain scenes, must begin with an examination of the relationship between design and sub- ject. A genuine resemblance theory of depiction, for instance, holds that a picture has a content as of its subject because its design resembles its subject—but more of this in the next chapter. F ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hq864hb3c303t7xyg44ppvx5)) > Others make manifest features of the process of their produc- tion, as a Pollock drip painting manifests the direction and force of the artist’s movements, the liquidity and stickiness of the paint, and the effects of gravity.4 Expression and manifestation are species of repre- sentation in so far as they draw our attention to features of the world— subjective mental states in one case and processes of making in the other.5 ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hq876339f07w7hxbm2q2p2tm)) ## New highlights added February 9, 2025 at 2:47 PM > Of course, pictures are objects in the world, too. They have physical properties that vary with their physical composition, size, age, and the like. Among these is a privileged set of visual properties, those by means of which pictures represent their subjects. I shall speak of these properties as making up pictures’ ‘designs’. An incomplete list of pic- torial design properties would include marks, directions, boundaries, contours, shapes, colours, hues, relative contrasts between light and dark, and also textures, such as smoothness of surface or invisibility of brushwork. Design properties are typically laid down in paint, ink, charcoal, or some other substance, on a flat surface. (However, the image of a slide projected on a screen shows that pictorial colours and shapes need not be comprised of any pigmented substance.) ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jkncne5bd6pspq4y36qzd5sh)) - Tags: [[psychedelic aesthetics paper]] - Note: good initial description of design properties > A syntactically *dense* system is not notational. It provides for a dense ordering of characters such that for every two there is provision for a third (and hence indefinitely many). Pictures belong to syntactically dense systems, because any difference in a picture’s design properties makes for a different character in the system, and there is no way to tell whether a given design belongs to one character or another. It should be emphasized that while picture systems *provide for* an indefinite number of characters such that between every two on any ordering there is a third, there need not be an indefinite number of pictures for depiction to be dense. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jkncs506dvdr02km4xd5j92f)) - Tags: [[psychedelic aesthetics paper]] - Note: we could ask whether mental processes are syntactially desnse representations. > Of course, pictures are objects in the world, too. They have physical properties that vary with their physical composition, size, age, and the like. Among these is a privileged set of visual properties, those by means of which pictures represent their subjects. I shall speak of these properties as making up pictures’ ‘designs’. An incomplete list of pic- torial design properties would include marks, directions, boundaries, contours, shapes, colours, hues, relative contrasts between light and dark, and also textures, such as smoothness of surface or invisibility of brushwork. Design properties are typically laid down in paint, ink, charcoal, or some other substance, on a flat surface. (However, the image of a slide projected on a screen shows that pictorial colours and shapes need not be comprised of any pigmented substance.) ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jkncm6tpbtx3a7xebeeyvx63))