Picture, Image, Icon.
I think there’s a close relation between clear thinking and an accurate use of language. For example, it’s common to hear designers using these three words as if they all have the same meaning. So just as it’s important to search out new material and sort it into useful categories, it’s essential to find out what the words used within your discipline really mean. Accurate definitions of language will help you be more precise in defining your concepts.
The word picture is the most common term for a visual representation of a person, an object or a landscape usually produced on a flat surface. Before the invention of photography, a picture was usually a painting or drawing. Photography has made it slightly more difficult to use language carefully, because while a photo is a picture, it’s really an image. The photographic process transfers the picture of what is seen in the viewfinder onto light sensitive paper and the result is never exactly what was seen, but a representation of it, that is an image (the same thought applies to digital photography).
Of course, before photography, artists made pictures that were also images, but it was less the result of the technical process and more their intention, cultural attitude or an entirely different view of reality to the one we hold today. The word image implies that there has been some interpretation of meaning in the process of making it. Of course, it is a picture, but it has been the subject of an intervention, either through technique, like making a film, or through the intention of the author, like the artist Francis Bacon.
When you see or look in a mirror, what you see is your image. It’s not you. It’s not even an accurate replica of you, because it’s in reverse: it’s a reflection. Equally, when you email a friend and describe your new lover to them on the basis of your memory, you visualise the beloved's image in your mind. It’s not a perfect replica of the person: it’s your perception of them and you probably remember them in the way they appear most attractive to you.
As a famous actress grows older we attach to her the beauty of her youthful image. In close-up we can see that her skin has begun to age, but our mind notices this for only a few moments: the allure of her youthful celluloid image is so powerful that she is concealed behind it (ref. Immortality, Milan Kundera).
Reflecting on this in his novel, Immortality, Milan Kundera imagines an event in a schoolroom, where his protagonist named Rubens secretly draws a caricature of the teacher, “Then he lifted his eyes from his drawing; the teacher’s features were in constant motion and did not resemble the picture. Nevertheless, whenever the teacher disappeared from his field of vision, Rubens was unable to imagine him in any way other than in the form of his caricature. The teacher disappeared forever behind his image.”
To understand how images can trump reality Kundera describes how Rubens went to the exhibition of a famous photographer where, “he saw the picture of a man with a bloody face, slowly lifting himself off the pavement. An unforgettable, mysterious photograph! Who was the man? What had happened to him? Probably an insignificant street accident Rubens told himself; a wrong step, a fall, a photographer unexpectedly present. Not sensing anything unusual the man got up, washed his face in a nearby café and went home to his wife. And at the same moment, intoxicated by its birth, his image separated itself from him and walked off in the opposite direction after its own adventure, its own destiny.”
Images then, seem to have the ability to assume a virtual life of their own. They are pictures with an added ingredient, a plus factor that allows them to assert their visual power. A person is never the same as his or her image: the image is always more. A photograph of Marilyn Monroe, a flat two-dimensional object, conveys all the myth of the MM legend and it can never disappoint us, grow old or die, in the way that the real Marilyn did.
It’s no accident that the word icon, among its several meanings, is a devotional painting of Christ or other venerated figure, typically executed on wood panel and used devotionally within the Byzantine and Eastern Churches. This is a good indication of the value of the word, but in our celebrity-obsessed society, image and icon have become interchangeable terms for a host of pretenders.
As Professor Martin Kemp explains, “the problem is compounded by the tendency of the modern media to downgrade such terms as genius and icon by applying them to too many examples. Elvis Presley, The Beatles, Marilyn Monroe and Muhammad Ali are undoubtedly icons in their particular domains and even beyond . . . however the term . . . is now scattered around so liberally and applied to so many figures or things of passing or local celebrity that it has tended to become debased” (Christ to Coke, Martin Kemp, Oxford University Press 2011).
So, what’s an icon? 1. It’s a picture of a venerated personage within the belief of the Eastern Church. 2. It’s an important and enduring symbol. 3. It’s one who is the object of great attention and devotion. These definitions would suggest that the word is reserved for quite exclusive use. Martin Kemp writes that, “an iconic image is one that has achieved wholly exceptional levels of widespread recognisability and has come to carry a rich series of varied associations for very large numbers of people across time and cultures . . . that it has transgressed the parameters of its initial function, context and making.” Professor Kemp recognizes that this is a rather ponderous definition, but it challenges us to consider whether an image is simply famous or notorious. He says that, “truly iconic images . . . accrue legends to a prodigious degree that is largely independent of how long they have been around . . . an extraordinary image demands an extraordinary explanation” (Christ to Coke, Martin Kemp, Oxford University Press 2011).
Who’s an icon? I think you should make your own list!