The image of a man, his portrait, is said to be like him, and one who portrays strives for a likeness. The best picture is a copy of the object, a replica or simulacrum. It must have the same form as the object and it should also have the same color if it is to be really faithful. A bad picture is one that is not sufficiently similar to what it is a picture of. A good picture is similar to what it is a picture of.

This assumption is superficially plausible and, in one form or another, has been widely believed from the time of the ancient Greek thinkers. A faithful picture of an object is one that resembles it. This theory is based in optics but not on the orthodox theory of image optics.ДЎ. Then I will suggest an alternative, a general theory of optical information available in pictures. But I believe that all of them are mistaken, and I reject all of them.Д¬onsidering them one by one, I will try to show how they are incorrect. And finally there is the assumption that the idea of an object, depending on a special sort of projection of the retinal image to the brain, has the same relation to the object that a picture does. This latter is closely related to the assumption that the retinal image is a picture of the object, in accordance with the still current and accepted theory of image optics that stems from Kepler. There is also a very old notion that the resemblance of a picture to its object is explained by a point-to-point projective correspondence between them. What do we mean by pictorial representation? Just what does a pictorial representation do? There is a very old assumption that a faithful picture of an object is one that resembles the object, or is similar to it. Copies may be circulated if this statement is included on each copy. References to these essays must cite them explicitly as unpublished manuscripts.

Gibson, Cornell University The World Wide Web distribution of James GibsonвЂ™s вЂњPurple PerilsвЂќ is for scholarly use with the understanding that Gibson did not intend them for publication. October 1972 On the Nature of Pictorial Representation

Pictorial representation