Depiction

1. The question posed

How do pictures represent? Like many other things, they represent in a variety of ways. Consider Picasso’s Guernica. It pictures a certain scene - horses, mutilated people, a light bulb, an explosion. It expresses the horror of war. It exemplifies art which is politically and morally engaged. In all these respects the picture may be said to represent something, but the forms of representation involved are not the same. Only one is distinctively pictorial - a piece of theatre or a novel might equally express the horrors of war and exemplify politically engaged art. It is this distinctively pictorial representation that philosophers generally mean by ‘depiction’. (The literature also calls it ‘pictorial representation’ or even, confusingly, just ‘representation’.) But what is it?

One way to focus this question is to contrast depiction with other ways of representing. The most useful comparison is with words. Words and pictures may perform many of the same tasks, and may represent many of the same things; yet, at least at first glance, they seem fundamentally different. A description of the scene depicted in Guernica would differ considerably from the painting, and it is tempting to think that this reflects differences in the forms of representation involved. Perhaps exploring the contrast with linguistic representation will illuminate depiction itself.