Chapter 1: Images, Power, and Politics

The beginning of Chapter one discusses the differences between what it means to see and what it means to look. It defines "look" as making meaning of whatever you are studying and "see" as noticing it for the moment, but not knowing the meaning of it. When someone tells you to "Look!" they are demanding that you look and studying whatever they are pointing at or looking at, they do not tell you to "See!" When we look at something we begin to wonder "What is this thing?" and "What does it do?" We can look at the art in a way of who the artist or creator is, but sometimes that does not tell us what we are looking for. Sometimes an artist will tell as story and it may be in third person. We can also come up with the story of the artwork by determining what the artwork is, what the context is that the creator meant for the piece to be seen in, how the artist wanted their artwork to be produced in, and what "world" did they want the artwork to exist in. But even with all of these puzzle pieces in place, we would not be able to know exactly what the author was thinking while creating the artwork. These are called intentional facilities or the ideas that the author had in mind while working on their creation. In Chapter One, page 15 there is a picture or a pipe, although written at the bottom of the painting it says "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" or "This is not a pipe." So was Rene Magritte being sarcastic or making a joke? Or did he really mean for it to mean something deeper. Or was he being literal, it is not a pipe, it is a representation of a pipe.

Today, people's portraits are everywhere; magazine covers, bilboards, signs outside of buildings, but what is the realism in the portraits. There is a myth of realism in photography, that because there is a picture it is real. The reason this is a myth is because photography can be staged.