What is the twofold view of depiction?
Depiction can be referred to as the representation of a given picture or artwork. A picture, on the other hand, can be a static instance of representing secular earthly objects. Pictures can show something that is not present or real including common cases where we might look at a picture of a person that is deceased. Pictures also employ compelling instances of symbolism. An example of this could be the subtle difference between a picture of an Apple logo and a picture of an actual edible apple. The apple logo seems to represent many features and properties of the edible apple particularly resembling size and shape dimensions though we understand that it is not a picture of a real apple and not edible.
However, it must be critiqued whether a picture can represent a certain object by being merely similar. There are numerous arguments that support that anything can be similar and dissimilar to anything else in an infinite number of ways. Thus, people have offered an alternative thesis that pictures are evolutionary fixated and naturally generative which means we are able to identify objects in our sight without any prior background knowledge on what we are seeing. This can be contrasted with words or literature in which background and context must be established to gain meaning in what we are seeing. In fact, it is almost intuitive that words do not resemble their referents. This is evident when a word mentions a color though it could never detail the exact hue that is visible to the naked human eye.
To understand how depiction is manifested in pictures, Bence Nanay presents to us a two-fold account of picture perception:
First Fold) the two-dimensional picture surface
Second Fold) the three-dimensional object the picture surface visually encodes.
For the most part, humans know when they are looking at a picture because the appearance of the objects remains constant despite our changing orientation. In other words, pictures are not distorted when viewed at an oblique angle. Acknowledging such a phenomenon would mean we are perceiving the surface of the picture in a somewhat unique way.
Bence Nanay expands further proposing that we concurrently perceive the picture surface (first fold), and the depicted object (second fold) at the same time. An example that captures Nanay’s theory is the Graphic Novel, “Here” by Richard McGuire. The novel presents to us, pictures that capture different time periods throughout history. Doing so invites the reader to psychologically interpret what he/she is seeing through mental imagery despite the fact the picture surface remains static and unchanged.
The pictures that make it into our consciousness, depend on what we attend to. The picture surface is perceived but unattended and therefore does not make into a conscious experience. However, we do ultimately perceive it, and it is in virtue of perceiving it that we consciously experience what is depicted in the picture. This is reminiscent of previous arguments made by Nanay, that aesthetic experiences must require focused attention on a single object at a time, with distributed attention regarding its properties. Thus, it is in the spirit of aesthetic experience that we can experience two folds at once with distributed/aesthetic attention.
All things considered; A twofold account of picture perception allows us to recognize the phenomenology in picture surface as a medium of depicting what is represented in the picture. The twofold account fundamentally depends on Nanay’s distinctions between attentive and inattentive experiences, and conscious and unconscious experiences and how we can perceive two folds at once with disjointed aesthetic experience.
