Image

"Beloved is man, for he was created in the image of God."

"His own image; no longer a dark, gray bird, ugly and disagreeable to look at, but a graceful and beautiful swan. To be born in a duck's nest, in a farmyard, is of no consequence to a bird, if it is hatched from a swan's egg."

"Iconic presence is presence in and as a picture. The physical presence of a picture in our world refers to the symbolic presence which it depicts. Similar to body and voice – and different from writing – the picture involves a representation which produces an impression of presence. This presence occupies an absence that is filled with a picture. In the iconic presence, absence is marked. Without denying the absence of what they represent, pictures offer absence as presence. The mask is just such a picture. It creates iconic presence by placing another face on the body. In the case of a dead person it restores the missing face. In the case of an actor, the face itself turns into a mask, and thus conveys a picture. If “iconic difference”(Boehm 1994, 29ff.) is a hermeneutic concern, iconic presence is an anthropological issue. In the context of religion, pictures represent deities who have no direct presence in the physical world; these deities are not held to be absent (let alone non-existent), but in need of a picture in order to become visible. In primal religions, living bodies transform into apparitions through dance and voice. In the Christian tradition, visual artefacts behaved as living bodies that wept, worked miracles, and were carried through “their” town, as if they could walk by themselves"

"Akin to the monuments of fallen despots in more recent times, religious pictures fell victim to iconoclasms directed against false or misused images (i.e. idols). In Judaism and Islam, the ban on images pertained only to their religious use and was directed against the visual practices of other populations; in Judaism against an older pictorial tradition (Uehlinger 2003) and in Islam against the use of images in Christian churches (Fowden 2014). In the context of Christianity the use of images was central to the project of becoming a world religion and of eschewing its Jewish legacy. The “true” portrait of Christ, a late phenomenon after the Council of Chalcedon (451), possessed a special evidence that was appropriated by competing theological schools in divergent ways. Pictures were then upgraded as originals. Iconic presence began to compete with the word in textual revelation. Already the notion of the Mother of God (Theotokos) at the Council of Ephesus (431) enhanced the doctrine of the two natures of Christ in one human face. Islamic theology returned to the verbal revelation of God. The Qur’an has been introduced as a book which God has sent to his prophet. With the Islamic rejection of Jesus as the son of God, the visibility of God became taboo once more. Aniconism is a picture theory under reverse conditions and usually reflects a negative experience with pictures. In the Reformation, text and picture competed with one other as different religious media, in a turn again Catholic visual politics. The Counter-Reformation above all used the weapons of a re-catholicized visual politics that transformed the space of the church into a theatre of heaven. The church directed this strategy against the private reading of the bible propagated by the Reformation. In modern secular society, religious pictures lost their old credibility, which also damaged their status as works of art. So even within the same religious tradition pictures were subject to historical change."

"I believe that robotic thinking helps precision of psychological thought, and will continue to help it until psychophysiology is so far advanced that an image is nothing other than a neural event, and object constancy is obviously just something that happens in the brain."

"A picture is a poem without words."

"Even when our death is imminent, we carry the image of ourselves moving forward, alive, into the future."

"While the film Life of Christ was rolling past before my eyes I was mentally visualizing the gods, Shri Krishna, Shri Ramachandra their Gokul and Ayodhya.. I was gripped by a strange spell. I bought another ticket and saw the film again. This time I felt my imagination taking shape in the screen. Could this really happen? Could we the sons of India, ever be able to see Indian images on the screen. The whole night passed in this mental agony."

"Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image (Hebrew פסל) or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth."

"The young watch television twenty-four hours a day, they don't read and they rarely listen. This incessant bombardment of images has developed a hypertrophied eye condition that's turning them into a race of mutants."

"In our Sunday news. Without morning coffee. On the bus, in the airport, at the checkout line Sharing our day off from work, from school, illicit and delicious with us under the quilt. Or domestic company, our of the corner of the eye as we fold the laundry in front of the television. It may be a 5 A.M. addiction to the glittering promises of the infomercial: the latest in fat-dissolving pills, miracle hair restoration, make-up secrets of the stars. Or a glancing relationship while waiting at the dentist, trying to distract from the impending root canal. Or a luscious, shiny smile, a deliberate splurge, a can’t-wait-to-get-home-with-you devotion. A teen magazine: tips on how to dress, how to wear your hair, how to make him want you. A movie seen at the theater, still large and magical in the dark. The endless commercials and advertisements we believe we pay no attention to. Constant, everywhere, no big deal. Like the water in the goldfish bowl, barely noticed by inhabitants. Or noticed, but dismissed: “Eye Candy”-a harmless indulgence. They go down easily, in and out, digested and forgotten. Hardly able anymore to rouse our indignation. Just pictures."

"“Frontline” asked Alexandra Shulman, editor of British “Vogue”, if the fashion industry felt any responsibility for creating the impossible to-achieve images that young girls measure themselves against. Shulman shrugged. “Not many people have actually said to me that they have looked at my magazine and decided to become anorexic.” Is it possible that Shulman actually believes it works that way?"

"Are we sophisticated enough to recognize that the images are not “real”? Does it matter?"

"What Haworth isn’t saying, too, is that the bar of what we consider “perfection” is constantly being raised-by cultural imagery, by the surgeon’s own recommendations, and by eyes that become habituated to interpreting every deviation as “defect.” Ann, a prospective patient described in the same “Vogue” article, has a well toned body of 105 pounds but is obsessed with what she sees as grotesque fat pockets on her inner thighs. “No matter how skinny I get, they get smaller but never go away,” she complains. It’s unlikely that Ann, whom Haworth considers a perfect candidate for liposuction, will stop there. “Plastic surgery sharpens your eyesight,” admits a more honest surgeon, “You get something done, suddenly you’re looking in the mirror every five minutes-at imperfections nobody else can see.” Where did Ann get the idea that any vestige of fat must be banished from her body? Most likely, it wasn’t from comparing herself to other real women, but to those computer-generated torsos-in ads for anti-cellulite cream and the like-whose hips and thighs and buttocks are smooth and seamless as gently sloping sand-dunes. No actual person has a body like that. But that doesn’t matter-because our expectations, our desires, our judgments about bodies, are becoming dictated by the digital. When was the last time you actually saw a wrinkle-or cellulite-or a drooping jowl-or a pucker or a pocket-in a magazine or video image? Ten years ago Harper’s magazine printed the invoice Esquire had received for retouching a cover picture of Michelle Pfeiffer. The picture was accompanied by copy that read: ”What Michelle Pfeiffer needs … is absolutely nothing.” What Pfeiffer’s picture alone needed to appear on that cover was actually $1,525 worth of chin trimming, complexion cleansing, neck softening, line removal, and other assorted touches."

"Now, in 2003, virtually every celebrity image you see-in the magazines, in the videos, and sometimes even in the movies-has been digitally modified. Virtually every image. Let that sink in. Don’t just let your mind passively receive it. Confront its implications. This is not just a matter of deception-boring old stuff, which ads have traded in from their beginnings. This is perceptual pedagogy, How to Interpret Your Body 101. These images are teaching us how to see. Filtered, smoothed, polished, softened, sharpened, re-arranged. And passing. Digital creations, visual cyborgs, teaching us what to expect from flesh and blood. Training our perception in what's a defect and what is normal. Are we sophisticated enough to know the images are not “real”? Does it matter? There are no disclaimers on the ads: “Warning: This body is generated by a computer. Don’t expect your thighs to look this way.” Would it matter to Ann if there were? Who cares about reality when beauty, love, acceptance beckon? Does sophistication have anything to do with it?"

"Until recently, most clinicians were not receptive to the arguments of feminists like Susie Ohrbach (and later, myself) that “body image disturbance syndrome,” binge/purge cycling, bulimic thinking,” and all the rest needed to be understood as much more culturally normative than generally recognized. They wanted to draw a sharp dividing line between pathology and normality-a line that can be very blurry when it comes to eating and body-image problems in this culture. And while they acknowledged that images “play a role,” they clung to the notion that only girls with a “predisposing vulnerability” get into trouble. Trained in a medical model which seeks the abuse or disorder in individual and family pathology, they hadn’t yet understood just how powerful, ubiquitous, and invasive the demands of culture are on our bodies and souls."

"One of the hardest challenges I faced, in presenting these ideas at conferences and public lectures, was getting medical professionals and academics to take cultural imagery seriously. Most clinicians, unaccustomated to viewing images as anything other than “mere fashion,” saw cultural interpretation as somehow minimizing the seriousness of eating disorders. I insisted-an argument I laid out explicitly in a later book, ‘Twilight Zones”-that images of slenderness are never “just pictures,” as the fashion magazines continually maintain (disingenuously) in their own defense. Not only are the artfully arranged bodies in the ads and videos and fashion spreads powerful lessons in how to see (and evaluate) bodies, but also they offer fantasies of safety, self-containment, acceptance, immunity from pain and hurt. They speak to young people not just about how to be beautiful but about how to become what the dominant culture admires, how to be cool, how to “get it together.” To girls who have been abused they may speak of transcendence or armoring or too-vulnerable female flesh. For racial and ethnic groups whose bodies have been marked as foreign, healthy, and primitive, or considered unattractive by Anglo-Saxon norms, they may cast the lure of assimilation, of becoming (metaphorically speaking) “white.”"

"Still, progressive forces are not entirely asleep in the empire of images. I think of YM teen magazine, for example. After conducting a survey which revealed that 86 percent of its young readers were dissatisfied with the way their bodies looked, YM openly declared war on eating disorders and body-image problems, instituting an editorial policy against the publishing of diet pieces and deliberately seeking out full-size modes-without “marking” them as such-for all its fashion spreads.(27) I like to think this resistance to the hegemony of the fat-free body may have something to do with the fact that the editors are young enough to have studied feminism and cultural studies while they got their B.A.’s in English and journalism. It’s easy, too, to be cynical. Today’s fashionable diversity is brought to us, after all, by the same people who brought us the hegemony of the blue-eyed blonde and who’ve made wrinkles and cellulite into diseases. It’s easy to dismiss fashion’s current love affair with full lips and biracial children as ethnic chic, fetishes of the month. To see it all as a shameless attempt to exploit ethnic niches and white beauty-tourism. Having a child, however, has given me another perspective, as I try to imagine how it looks through her eyes. Cassie knows nothing about the motives of the people who’ve produced the images. At her age, she can only take them at face value. And at face value, they present a world which includes her, celebrates her, as the world that I grew up in did not include and celebrate me. For all my and cynicism and frustration with our empire of images, I cannot help but be grateful for this."

"On good days, I feel heartened by what is happening in the teen magazines and in the Lane Bryant and “Just My Size” ads. Perhaps advertisers are discovering that making people feel bad about themselves, then offering products which promise to make it all better, is not the only way to make a buck. As racial representations have shown, diversity is marketable. Perhaps, as Lane Bryant and others are hoping, encouraging people to feel okay about their bodies can sell products too. Sometimes, surveying the plastic, digitalized world of bodies that are the norm now, I am convinced that our present slate of enchantment is just a moment away from revulsion, or perhaps simply boredom. I see twenty-something woman dancing at a local outdoor swing party, her tummy softly protruding over the thick leather belt of her low-rider jeans. Not taut, not toned, not artfully camoflauged like some unsightly deformity, but proudly, sensuously displayed, reminding me of Madonna in the days before she became the sinewy dominatrix. It is possible that we are beginning to rebel against the manufactured look of celebrity bodies, beginning to be repelled by their armored “perfection”? These hopeful moments, I have to admit, are fleeting. Usually, I feel horrified-and afraid for my daughter. I am sharply aware that expressing this horror openly nowadays is to run the risk of being thought a preachy prude, relic of an outmoded feminism. At talks to young audiences, I try to lighten my touch, celebrate the positive, make sure that my criticisms of our culture are not confused with being anti-beauty, anti-fitness, or anti-sex. But I also know that when parents and teachers become fully one with the culture, children are abandoned to it. I don’t tell them to love their bodies or turn off the television-useless admonitions today, and one I cannot obey myself. But I do try to provide disruption, if only temporary, of their everyday immersion in the culture. For just an hour or so, I won’t let it pass itself off simply as “normalcy.”"

"The lights go down, the slides go up. Much bigger than they appear in the magazines, but also, oddly brought down to size. For just a moment we confront how bizarre, how impossible, how contradictory the images are. We laugh together over Oprah’s head digitally grafted to another woman’s body, at the ad for breast implants in which the boobs stick straight up into the air. We gasp together as the before and after photos of Jennifer Lopez are placed side by side. We cheer for Marion Jones’s shoulders, boo the fact that WNBA Barbie is just the same old Barbie, but with a basketball in her hand. For just a moment, we are in charge of the impact the faked images of “perfect" bodies have on us. We look at them together and share-just for a moment-outrage."

"Susceptibility to “images” can still be conceptualized in terms of a passive subject and a mechanical process. To acknowledge, however, that meaning is continually being produced at all levels-by the culture, by the subject, by the clinician as well-and that in a fundamental sense there “is” no body that exists neutrally, outside this process of making meaning, no body that passively awaits the objective deciphering of trained experts, is to question the presuppositions on which much of modern science is built and around which our highly specialized, professionalized, and compartmentalized culture revolves. Or, to put this another way: it is to suggest that the study of the disordered body is as much the proper province of cultural critics in every field and of nonspecialists, ordinary but critically questioning citizens, as it is o the “experts.” This audacious challenge is the legacy of the feminist reconceptualization of eating disorders."

"Then God said, 'Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, … So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them."

"Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed: for in the image of God made he man."

"Behavior is a mirror in which everyone displays his own image."

"It's funny how your relationship with your own looks changes when you go weeks without seeing yourself. None of us really knows what we look like after all. In that nanosecond it takes for a mirror to give our faces back to us our mind has already done all sorts of perverse rearranging."

"One picture in ten thousand, perhaps, ought to live in the applause of mankind, from generation to generation until the colors fade and blacken out of sight or the canvas rot entirely away."

"Like the ancient snake that bites its own tail, seeing a circle in a dream can suggest the things in your life that are sacred and remain unchanged, even while you travel through metamorphosis. As an image of returning to the beginning, it can suggest that a cycle is completing so that a new one will soon emerge."

"Memory offers up its gifts only when jogged by something in the present. It isn't a storehouse of fixed images and words, but a dynamic associative network in the brain that is never quiet and is subject to revision each time we retrieve an old picture or old words."

"Can any one deny that the old Israelites conceived Jahveh not only in the image of a man, but in that of a changeable, irritable, and, occasionally, violent man?"

"Images are books for the illiterate and silent heralds of the honor of the saints, teaching those who see with a soundless voice and sanctifying the sight."

"Images are much more available now than they were in the 1970s. It's very hard to convey that. Now, people can see what they like on their mobile phone."

"An empty canvas is a living wonder -- far lovelier than certain pictures."

"Who will believe us when we say that we do not love these stuffed dummies—carved or painted images—when our deeds convict us? God hates and despises images, as I shall show. He considers them an abomination and says that all human beings are in his eyes as the things they love. Images are an abomination; it follows therefore that we too shall become abominable, if we love them."

"It cannot therefore be true that images are the textbooks of laypersons. For they are unable to learn their salvation from them. ... How can you save lay persons when you ascribe to images the power which God gave to his word alone?"

"If you were to really hate and dislike a picture with all your heart, so that you could not bear to see or hear of it, how would you like it if someone insisted on getting to know and honor you through such a hated, horrible book? ... And God says that he does not like any image which we make, and ... that he hates and despises all who love images."

"God desires to indwell in my whole and total heart and cannot in any way tolerate my having an image in my mind's eye."

"It was a beautiful embodied thought, A dream of the fine painter, one of those That pass by moonlight o'er the soul, and flit 'Mid the dim shades of twilight, when the eye Grows tearful with its ecstasy."

"When the crucified Jesus is called the 'image of the invisible God', the meaning is that this is God, and God is like this."

"The picture that approaches sculpture nearest Is the best picture."

"Magic and art tend to share a lot of the same language. They both talk about evocation, invocation, and conjuring. If you’re trying to conjure a character, then maybe you should treat that with the respect that you would if you were trying to conjure a demon. Because if an image of a god is a god, then in some sense the image of a demon is a demon. I’m thinking of people like Malcolm Lowry, the exquisite author of Under the Volcano. There are kabbalistic demons that are lurking all the way through Under the Volcano, and I assume they were probably similar forces to the ones that eventually overwhelmed Lowry’s life, such as the drinking and the madness. When I hear alcoholics talk about having their demons, I think that they’re probably absolutely literally correct."

"Um Habiba and Um Salama mentioned about a church they had seen in Ethiopia in which there were pictures. They told the Prophet about it, on which he said, "If any religious man dies amongst those people they would build a place of worship at his grave and make these pictures in it. They will be the worst creature in the sight of Allah on the Day of Resurrection."

"Man makes god in his own image."

"My goal was to be different, strong; to sculpt my own body to reinvent the self. It's all about being different and creating a clash with society because of that. I tried to use surgery not to better myself or become a younger version of myself, but to work on the concept of image and surgery the other way around. I was the first artist to do it."

"I am not sure I can change such a thing, but I can produce images that are different from those we find in comics, video games, magazines and TV shows. There are other ways to think about one's body and one's beauty. If you were to describe me without anyone being able to see me, they would think I am a monster, that I am not fuckable. But if they see me, that could perhaps change."

"In the old days pictures went forward toward completion by stages. Every day brought something new. A picture used to be a sum of additions. In my case a picture is a sum of destructions. I do a picture — then I destroy it. In the end though, nothing is lost: the red I took away from one place turns up somewhere else."

"I think a picture is more like the real world when it is made out of the real world."

"We are frequently faced with the necessity of looking for the picture required for the visualization of an object, not in the perception of this particular object, but in a different perceptual image. ...we can assert the discrepancy between the perceived picture and the objective state. This discrepancy... proves absolutely nothing against the fact that all visualizations are merely sense qualities of the perceptual space. ...If the parallelism is ...to be visualized, we must supplement our assertion by the description of certain qualities with which we are familiar from perceptual space."

"Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images (εἰκόνος) resembling mortal man."

"Like the Great Communicator who charms through lies, the medical authority figure- paternalistic and technocratic at the same time - delivers these messages less by his words than by the power of his image and his persona."

"As with any visual image, The Silent Scream relies on our predisposition to "see" what it wants us to "see" because of a range of influences that come out of the particular culture and history in which we live. The aura of medical authority, the allure of technology, the cumulative impact of a decade of fetal images- on billboards, in shopping center malls, in science fiction blockbusters like 2001: A Space Odyssey-all rescue the film from utter absurdity; they make it credible. "The fetal form" itself has, within the larger culture, acquired a symbolic import that condenses within it a series of losses-from sexual innocence to compliant women to American imperial might. It is not the image of a baby at all but of a tiny man, a homunculus."