What Does Seeing an Image Mean?

Abstract

To ask what seeing an image means is nothing more than trying to understand how, in viewing images, we become spectators with a new role of speaking and desiring subjects. The Christian history of images was significant for western relationships to images as the iconoclastic crisis created fundamental distinctions between vision and gaze, visible and invisible, power and authority, belief and suspicion. If we look further at paleontological images found in caves, it seems that the iconic gesture represents the speaking and desiring subject. The Christian doctrine was an ‘economical’ sequence of negotiation between anthropological truth and political purposes.