Getting the picture

Abstract

This article is about looking: looking at images and the problematics of seeing and interpretation that this activity entails; and looking for images, in the sense of searching for the pictures that one would like to see. A significant development of the age of digital reproduction, of a technological environment that allows access to more visual images than ever before, is that these two ‘looks’ have become entangled. For the user of digital archives and databases, there has to be a way of finding and retrieving relevant images from a corpus of hundreds, even thousands, of images, which can then be seen and interpreted; while for the developer of these digital repositories, the interpretative process has always already begun: one has to analyse the images in order to determine how they can, or should, be searched. This article, then, is literally about ‘getting the picture’, of the new possibilities of searching for, across and within pictures that is opened up by recent technologies. However, it is also about the problems raised by this process. In particular, it explores the implications of textually describing, or ‘marking up’ images so that they can be searched.

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