“A thing of beauty is a joy forever”

What is an image?

“A thing of beauty is a joy forever” (John Keats).

There is a diversity of meanings and there are all kinds of means of visual expression that we consider as “images", which coexist, such as, a child's drawing, a film, an advertising poster, “speaking in images”, a photograph, a mental image, but we understand it.

It’s understood as something used to represent something in its absence, presenting a “magical” component. It captures a fragment of a reality that no longer exists, lasting through time.

In Plato's allegory of the cave in the work entitled The Republic (Book VII), where he called the images “to the shadows (…) to reflections, to the waters or the surface of opaque, polished and shiny bodies and all similar representations” and in the Bible in which “God created Man in his image” we learn that the individual is himself an image, a resemblance of the Beautiful and the Sacred.

We produce the images and the images produce us.